Launching A Leadership Revolution

Orrin Woodward Scams, Coercion, And Network Marketing- Part 2

2011-10-29T19:53:00.000-04:00

In the second part of Orrin Woodward's review of Scams and Networking, Orrin reviews personal responsibility and the victim mentality. What a pertinent essay considering the current state of our country. I suggest we reprint this and float leaflets of this information over the "Occupy Wall Street" protesters. This is nothing short of fantastic information on how to succeed in today's world, something that isn't taught in any learning institutions but should be!

God Bless!
Capt. Bill

Robert Kiyosaki - author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Rich Dad Poor Dad

Network marketing teaches basic, critical life skills. It teaches people how to overcome their fears, how to communicate, and how to handle rejection and maintain persistence. This kind of education is absolutely priceless. Here’s what I tell people: “Even if you don’t like it, stay with it for five years and you’ll be better equipped to survive in the real world of business. And you’ll be a better person.” The people who are successful in network marketing have a spiritual cause. They genuinely want to help better others’ lives. If you don’t have that, if you just want a paycheck, then work for the post office!

Success isn’t easy, but then again, neither is failure

When people call the entire Network Marketing profession a scam, merely because they didn’t succeed, it demonstrates their lack of understanding of scams and personal responsibility. No one should teach that success in Networking is easy, since it’s not, but failure certainly isn’t easy either. Malcolm Gladwell, a best selling author, teaches that success in any field requires 10,000 hours of diligent study and action. Anything less, and that person is still an amateur in his profession. For someone to try Networking for several years, and then state it’s a scam, is simply a version of Aesop’s fables, sour grapes from an amateur fox who couldn’t reach the desired fruit. For example, in high school, I wrestled in many tournaments. I could not of imagined any wrestler calling the tournament a scam because he didn’t receive a medal. The sour grapes wrestler would have been laughed out of the arena, since many do not win medals, not having at that moment, learned the skills and put in the hours to win at a tournament level.

Seth Godin is author of the New York Times bestsellers The Dip and Tribes

Network marketing works when it’s not about you. It works when it is about the customer. Not sort of about the customer as a way of helping you, not kinda about the customer when you imagine how they could act like you and become part of your downline. No, it works when it is generous and transparent and true. If someone buys from you because they are a friend or because it’s easier than avoiding you, that’s not about the customer. Here’s my dream for you: find a product and a price and a story that people choose to seek out. Discover a niche that people would miss if it disappeared. Offer an experience that’s about more than money, more than making a living and more than recruiting a new salesperson. When you bring joy and utility and trust to people (at a fair price), they’ll embrace you.

Anonymous Victims Online

In today’s society, people can write anonymously about their victimization, crying about their lack of results, claiming to be scammed from the Networkers (better wrestlers) who kicked their butts in free enterprise, while the victims claim it was rigged against them, even though others seem to be winning while they are whining. If someone felt they were hurt, why not seek out the leaders of the company or community for resolution? Doesn’t this sound like the right thing, not to mention the honorable thing to do? Rather than post anonymously, hiding their identities as well as their real motives, assaulting the reputations of people that they don’t personally know, why not call the community leaders or the company to get the issue resolved? This is why anonymous blog postings hold no value with me. If someone doesn't feel strong enough about his opinion to state his real name, then why should I give his opinion any credence at all? Any reputable company would serve the customer in a heartbeat. I have personally been involved in several customer issues myself over the years, and they were amicably resolved. I believe in customer satisfaction and have grown my business through the application of this principle consistently. In fact, the TEAM initiated a email help system, similar to Amazon's, to ensure all issues are resolved promptly. If anyone leaves the TEAM unhappy, it wasn’t through lack of concern, but through lack of interest by the customer to address. Perhaps, the real reason that many post in Networking are anonymous, postings that act as if they are upset at the company, are because they are from competitors, not real customers. These are the bottom feeders of Networking, the parasite marketers, who, believing in a win-lose scarcity mentality, blatantly attack one company’s reputation for the alleged benefits supplied to their current company. Sadly, this egregious behavior happens often, leading to much of the negative written online. When the perceived opportunity for gain exceeds the applied character of those involved, parasite marketing will typically occur.
Orrin Woodward

Failure Is One of Life’s Greatest Teachers!

2011-10-05T21:51:00.000-04:00

Orrin studies leadership and success in absolutely everything. Everyone has a story we can learn from, some are by example to emulate, and some are by example to avoid. I hope you enjoy this tidbit as much as I did!

Capt. Bill

I found this excellent article about Michael Jordan. MJ was one of the most enjoyable athletes to watch in any sport—he was a consummate professional in his field. From last minute heroics,stellar defense or deft passing, Michael helped everyone on his team play better. In fact, he even helped the opposing team play better because of his presence. There is much we can learn from individualswho accept nothing less than excellence in their life. MJ is one of the greatest and we all should learn from his hunger to rise above the field.
God Bless, Orrin Woodward

Growing up every body wanted to be like Mike. Kids would wear Michael Jordan shoes in the hopes that some of his magic might rub off onto them. No other man in history has been able to single handedly shape a game as Michael Jordan did in his career. He was one of the most fiercest competitors to ever
grace the courts and as a result dominated the game like no one else in history.

His sporting achievements read like a dream list, winning 6 NBA championships, 10-time All-NBA First Team, Defensive Player of the Year, Rookie of the Year, 14-time All-Star, two time Olympic gold medalist, countless MVP’s to his credit and inducted as one of 50 Greatest Players in NBA History. There is no question that Jordan was a winner, here are some timeless lessons we can learn from his legacy:

1. Winners Aren’t Afraid To Fail

“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” – Michael Jordan

Jordan ended his amazingly stellar career with a field goal shooting average of 0.497%. Imagine one of the greatest players in history missing nearly one in every two of his shots, some of which were no doubt in pivotal moments of the game and even potential game winners. Most people make decisions in their life as if one misstep or setback would cause their house of cards to come crumbling down beneath their feet. They fear failure, fear letting down their friends or family, fear what others might think about them, fear the consequences of their actions and thus visualize the worst case scenarios in their mind.

Winners are those rare individuals who in spite of all odds, choose to put their hand up for that game winning shot and whether they make the basket or not, know that they put 100% into that moment. The difference between hero and villain is a fine line and winners know the highs and lows of both. To be given the responsibility and the privilege like Jordan did over and over again in his career to take the game winning shot you must prepare the best you can, live the best you can and believe in every ounce of your ability. Winners don’t just rely on blind faith and see failure as a lesson to learn from. Failure is one of life’s greatest teachers and if you but embrace those lessons you will bestronger for it.

2. Winners Work Harder And Smarter

“I’ve always believed that if you put in the work, the results will come. I don’t do things half-heartedly. Because I know if I do, then I can expect half-hearted results.” – Michael Jordan

It is always surprising to hear people who talk about achieving success in their field, instead of being willing to put in the hard work they look for short cuts. They look to gain as much as they can by working as little as they can. To look for shortcuts is a fools game, no one ever achieved excellence in any great undertaking by subscribing to the ethic of laziness. Jordan was cut from the varsity team as a sophomore during his time at Laney High School in Wilmington. “Whenever I was working out and got tired and figured I ought to stop, I’d close my eyes and see that list in the locker room without my name on it,” Jordan said, “and that usually got me going again.” He eventually made the team and led it to the state championship. At age 35 he was still working harder than most of the players half his age, and he was still out maneuvering them on the basketball courts. He out hustled, out played, and out skilled his contemporaries a fraction of his age. Jordan’s secret was his work ethic was like no other, even at an age where he had already proved he was the greatest living basketball player, he still worked harder than everyone else to continue to develop his game.

3. Winners Rise Above The Low Expectation Of Others

“If you accept the expectations of others, especially negative ones, then you never will change the outcome.” – Michael Jordan

You have to be willing to rise about the mediocrity of your peers and critics. Mediocrity is a disease that takes hold on those who aren’t strong enough to hold onto their dreams, who don’t have enough belief in them self or too scared to rise above the crowd. When Jordan was cut from the Varsity team
in high school, he was relegated to playing for the Junior Varsity team and worked on his skills during the summer with his brother. He spent that year developing his skills and honing his craft earning him a spot in the varsity team a year later. The rest is history. If he was to have believed that he wasn’t good enough like his coach then imagine history without Jordan jumping through the air and making impossible jump shots. Winners aren’t confined to the domain of the most gifted, the most talented or the one with the most opportunities and resources. At the end of the day winners are the ones who rise above everybody else’s thinking and believes in themselves. They pay the price to become the best.

4. Winners Love What They Do

“Even when I’m old and grey, I won’t be able to play it, but I’ll still love the game.” – Michael Jordan

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that Jordan loved the game. Basketball for Jordan was something that brought him joy and fulfillment. He played basketball as a young kid with his father and older brother way before his skills and talents were even known. He worked hard to follow his passion even when obstacles were presented in his path. The path to greatness is all uphill and if you aren’t doing something your passionate about then that road uphill very quickly becomes a grinding slog. Life is too short to slog your way through life, if you know the path is uphill then at least find something that you love to do so that you can have fun while doing it.

5. Winners Are In It To Win

“I play to win, whether during practice or a real game. And I will not let anything get in the way of me and my competitive enthusiasm to win.” – Michael Jordan

Jordan might be considered an over achiever, but he wasn’t sweating it out week in week out to just be in the game. Jordan’s tenacity and drive to win iswhat fueled much of his devotion to the game and his outstanding record ofsuccess was the scorecard. He pushed his body to it’s limit so that he could see
what it was possible in achieving. Sure you might argue that it’s just a game,it’s not like world peace is at stake but what separates winners from losers istheir willingness to get off the sideline and play all in. They dedicatethemselves to an undertaking of excellence in everything they do and commit to a path forged with professionalism.

6. Winners Overcome Obstacles In Their Path

“If you’re trying to achieve, there will be roadblocks. I’ve had them; everybody has had them. But obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.” – Michael Jordan

It is amazing how often people quit at the first sign of defeat. Instead of pushing through that defeat they see it as some sort of sign that this path was not theirs to begin with and go seeking another path for their life. The problem is that these people never stick to one thing long enough for success to sprout. They dabble at this and dabble at that and achieve mastery at nothing in life. Obstacles are put on your path to challenge you to rise to a whole new level, a level often time you didn’t even knew existed in your human potential. Obstacles give you a reason to strive further, work harder and find that inner strength that each and everyone of us possess if we just are willing to tap into it.

7. Winners Make Things Happen
“Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen.” – Michael Jordan

Opportunities don’t magically fall into your lap, you have to create those opportunities. Winners are proactive with their dreams, they are willing to do what the loser’s only dream about. Instead of complaining, getting upset or trying to explain why things didn’t happen for you, stand up and take charge of your destiny. Shape it the way you want, if one door closes, work twice as hard till the next door opens. You can turn around your life today if you just subscribe to the winners mindset that all things are possible if you put your mind to it. Jordan revolutionized the game of basketball, he created what to mere mortals look like impossible shots from impossible angles.He dazzled professional athletes by making them look amateurish by dribbling around them and pulling out jump shots. Jordan devoted his life to masteringhis craft and created shots that generations to come would emulate. He didn’tjust play the game, he created the game as he went and defined the game.

RESOLVED: 13 Resolutions for LIFE!

2011-09-24T10:14:00.000-04:00

Here's another example of the quality input from the #7 leadership guru in the world Orrin Woodward from his upcoming release RESOLVED: 13 Resolutions for LIFE.

Enjoy!
Capt. Bill

Here is a snippet from the new RESOLVED: 13 Resolutions for LIFE book coming out November 1. Sam Walton is one of my favorite all-time business men because he endured so many setbacks and criticisms on his way to massive success. Enjoy. Orrin Woodward

Walton, after a decade of being the Butler Brothers top performer, began to chafe under their rigid bureaucracy and mismanagement. The Butler Brothers, who at the time made huge profits with their business model, seemed incapable of recognizing the impending, competitive threat from discounting stores to their variety store chain. But Walton, not suffering from the myopia, recognized before others that the variety stores chains must adapt or die. The billionaire Butler Brothers, in a hubris induced coma, preferred to play it safe. They may have secured higher margins temporarily, but ultimately, they destroyed their business by not responding to the “creative destruction” inherent in the free enterprise system.

Walton anticipated the future, realizing the days of high margins were following the dinosaur into extinction becoming a fatality of the discount store’s more competitively priced business model. Walton flew up to the Butler Brothers’ office in Chicago, proposing a partnership with them to launch a discount model. He wasn’t far into his presentation when he mentioned the margins would have to be cut from the typical 25% plus to around 12.5% or less of the sale’s price. This terminated the meeting. Walton recalled, “They blew up,” not willing to risk their easy profits; choosing instead, to ride out the variety store model into business oblivion. Exasperated, Walton explained that the profits would be made up on volume; that the high margins were going away regardless, but the Butler Brothers, blinded by the past, rejected the new reality along with Walton.

Not easily dismayed, Walton flew to Texas, hoping to become a franchiser of Herb Gibson, the highly successful discounter at the time. Gibson however, rejected Walton outright, seeing Walton, “as a bush-league variety-store merchant who possessed neither the finances nor the experience necessary to succeed in the Gibson chain.” Not surprisingly, it’s the revolutionary leaders with the largest of visions who must endure endless criticism from those who profit from the past, who stand to lose the most if the leader’s vision is fulfilled. Walton, with every avenue possible rejected, did what all revolutionary leaders do in this situation – he did it anyway. In fact, 95% of the money for the original Walmart came from Walton himself; simply because no one else believed enough in his vision to invest

Now Hear This!

2011-08-27T18:35:00.001-04:00

Important scuttlebutt from the bridge, pass it on!
Capt. Bill

Special Announcement: On October 3, Blogharbor will be closing its doors, my blog will be moving over to WordPress. All of the relevant leadership material will migrate with me. :)

Chris Brady and I went to Lansing, Michigan for a Super Open. With TEAM in it's pre-launch phase of LIFE, numbers and excitement are peaking! With over 1500 in live attendance plus 760 TEAM Casts locations, with an average of 15-20 per house, this was the single biggest Open meeting in TEAM's history. Now people can enjoy the leadership training in the comfort of their own or a neighbors house, reducing the amount of time, travel and hotel space needed, while increasing the quality of speaker content across the community. Here is a description of the intersectional quality of TEAM's new business model - LIFE. LIFE's plan is to grow all 8F's, helping serve each member with the only company with two of the Top 30 Leadership Gurus and New York Times Best Selling Authors. Not too mention the lowest priced leadership products, all within the record setting TEAM community. Finally, In November, LIFE will launch the most lucrative compensation plan in the history of Networking. I love win-win-win, and this plan is a win for customers, win for TEAM members, and win for Dallin Larsen. I personally want to thank Dallin Larsen, Ernst & Young entrepreneur of the year, for having the vision and foresight to partner with leaders in a win-win fashion. When TEAM reaches a million people, he will be happy with the results. :) Onward to 1 million! God Bless, Orrin Woodward

Control Issues!

2011-07-05T19:43:00.000-04:00

This post by Orrin Woodward, number seven leadership guru in the world, is the main reason I decided after several decades to return to church. There is much to be said for the power of mentoring, and the association with a community of postive minded people who are interested in nothing but your success!
Enjoy!
Capt. Bill

Don’t let the issues outside of your control, stop you from addressing issues inside of your control.

If I have seen it once, I have seen it a thousand times, a talented person with a willingness to work, stopped cold by dwelling on issues outside of his control. This type of thinking takes on many forms, but let me give you an example to help you recognize it in your own thinking. Suppose you are looking at attending a certain school, learning that one of your friends attended the school, you seek him out to learn from his experiences. If he shares that he quit the school because it was too hard, requiring too many hours of studying and not enough for play, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t attend. If you have a dream, and are willing to work, it doesn’t tell you anything about your potential experiences at the school; since education, like nearly all life, is a matter of personal responsibility. But, if your friends failed attempt at school, blocks your dream to even apply, then two failures have occurred, one a failure of action, the other a failure of thinking. How do you control your friends work ethic? How do you know if your friend was truly committed to the school and his dreams? Why are you letting your friends actions hinder your opportunities? Leaders can only control themselves and the decisions they make, with others, they have only influence, not control.

There are numerous examples of poor thinking in allowing issues outside of your control to affect the issues inside of your control. Here are some other poor thinking scenarios:

1. I don’t attend church because a hypocrite goes there. Why allow a hypocrite to stop you from learning Truth for you and your family?

2. I am not a business owner because I had a bad experience with a business person. Why allow a bad business person to deny you of future opportunities?

3. I don’t go to doctors because I had a bad experience with a doctor. Why threaten your health because of one doctor’s incompetence.

4. I don’t read, because a teacher told me that I was dyslexic and would never be able to read. Why allow a teacher’s label to halt your personal growth.

5. I don’t talk to people because my parents told me that I was shy. Why allow your parents label, when you were a child, to hinder your future?

6. I don’t attempt great things for God, because my family has never accomplished anything great. Why allow your family’s past to hinder its future?

7. I don’t save money, because I was told that I would always be in debt. Why allow someone’s poor thinking on money become your thinking?

8. I don’t dream, because I saw my friend dream and fail. Why not learn from failures versus become one?

9. I am not getting married because so many people get divorces. Why not learn the successful marriages versus focus on the failed ones.

10. I am not having children because the world is so messed up. Why not learn how to prepare children for life versus deny them the opportunity for life?

I could go on and on, but I think you get the point. Instead of allowing the things that you don’t control (other peoples thoughts and actions), to create your reality, why not focus on the things that you do control (your thoughts and actions)? I grew up in Columbiaville, Michigan, a small village with few, if any, big thinkers. It would have been easy to succumb to the ‘stinking thinking’ around Laurie and myself, but through God’s Grace, and a ton of effort, we broke free from the mold. Instead of dwelling on our parents faults, since all parents have them, Laurie and I focused on our parents strengths. We learned work ethic and the ability to think from our parents, and applied to every endeavor we undertook. One of the keys to breaking out is to major on your majors, not on the failed minors of others. Yes, people will let you down, shame on them, but that shouldn’t stop you from fulfilling your purpose. Yes, your family may hurt you at times, but that doesn’t stop end your responsibility to love and lead them. Yes, your vision, like a ship, may take on water every now and then, but leaders understand that it’s part of the journey, rebuilding the ship bigger and stronger. Your dream cannot be stolen, but through poor thinking, it can be surrendered. Life is much easier, since Laurie and I decided to press on regardless of the actions of others, that we were in the game no matter what. This released the stress and anxiety, felt by most people, created when not truly committed to a course of action. Leaders decide, backing the decision with full commitment, making the decision right by overwhelming passion and effort.

Did we have setbacks? Of course. Did we have people make promises while not following through? Many examples. Did we stay the course? To the best of our ability and know how, an emphatic yes. We cannot control other peoples poor decisions, but the last thing we should do, is to compound the mistake by piling on. Laurie and I have witnessed many people, with more talent than us, sabotage their own success by allowing poor thinking to take root in their minds. Usually, by the time the weeds have ruined their thinking, they no longer are interested in hearing the advice to help pull the weeds, even getting offended at the suggestion that they are growing weeds. I do my best to help point out the improper thinking, if they are willing to listen, but, at the end of the day, people are responsible for the fruit, or lack of fruit, produced in their minds, pulling weeds when identified is standard fare for leaders. Thus, one of the biggest weeds that can grow, if not pulled quickly, is permitting issues outside of your control to hinder your attitude and actions on the issues inside of your control. For example, if you aren’t reading, listening and learning daily in your chosen field, thinking what’s the use, since you aren’t getting the results in life that you want, then you are revealing a huge weed in your own thinking. It takes time to develop master in any field, in fact it takes 10,000 hours according to Malcolm Gladwell and Geoff Colvin, both authors who write on achievement, but most quit in despair long before this. By allowing things outside of your control, a lack of 10,000 hours when you start something new, to stop you from doing what is inside of your control, building up the hours to reach 10,000 for mastery in your field, you ensure that mastery will never arrive in any field. It truly is that simple, though not that easy.

Success in life, is simply a matter of staying focused on the areas that you control, surrendering to God the areas that are outside of your control. What a leader discovers is, that others, influenced by their example, address issues, improving the community through a leader’s influence, not control. The community, inspired by the leaders courage, in confronting and changing areas of control, make the tough changes in their lives to grow. None of this would have happened, if the leader would have dwelled upon areas that he doesn’t control. It was only because the leader stayed the course, even when it hurt, that it strengthened the resolve of others to change their lives. Are you that type of leader for your family, community, and team?

One of the best decisions that a leader will ever make in life is to be “all in”, in whatever field that s/he is pursuing. Greatness doesn’t happen to those who dabble, nor to those who deliberate, but only to those who decide. Laurie and I are “all in” for our 8F’s - Faith, Family, Friends, Freedom, Finances, Fitness, Following, and Fun. What are you “all in” for in life? Life has become so much fuller by learning the secret of sacrifice. When Laurie and I sacrifice our current conveniences for our convictions, we receive a ten fold return on, not only on our own 8F’s, but also in the joy of seeing others develop their 8F’s. Look back upon your own life, didn’t you achieve more when you kept your mind focused on the areas that you could control, instead of dwelling upon what you didn’t control? Today is the day to start thinking like the leader you plan on becoming. God Bless, Orrin Woodward

Leadership Control And Influence!

2011-06-21T21:36:00.000-04:00

More great input from Orrin Woodward, this one really hit home for me! I feel so blessed to be mentored by both Orrin and Laurie because I constantly get wisdom like this first hand. Part of the leadership journey is challenging the thinking that led to the results your currently getting.
Enjoy!
Capt. Bill

Don’t let the issues outside of your control, stop you from addressing issues inside of your control.

If I have seen it once, I have seen it a thousand times, a talented person with a willingness to work, stopped cold by dwelling on issues outside of his control. This type of thinking takes on many forms, but let me give you an example to help you recognize it in your own thinking. Suppose you are looking at attending a certain school, learning that one of your friends attended the school, you seek him out to learn from his experiences. If he shares that he quit the school because it was too hard, requiring too many hours of studying and not enough for play, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t attend. If you have a dream, and are willing to work, it doesn’t tell you anything about your potential experiences at the school; since education, like nearly all life, is a matter of personal responsibility. But, if your friends failed attempt at school, blocks your dream to even apply, then two failures have occurred, one a failure of action, the other a failure of thinking. How do you control your friends work ethic? How do you know if your friend was truly committed to the school and his dreams? Why are you letting your friends actions hinder your opportunities? Leaders can only control themselves and the decisions they make, with others, they have only influence, not control.

There are numerous examples of poor thinking in allowing issues outside of your control to affect the issues inside of your control. Here are some other poor thinking scenarios:

1. I don’t attend church because a hypocrite goes there. Why allow a hypocrite to stop you from learning Truth for you and your family?

2. I am not a business owner because I had a bad experience with a business person. Why allow a bad business person to deny you of future opportunities?

3. I don’t go to doctors because I had a bad experience with a doctor. Why threaten your health because of one doctor’s incompetence.

4. I don’t read, because a teacher told me that I was dyslexic and would never be able to read. Why allow a teacher’s label to halt your personal growth.

5. I don’t talk to people because my parents told me that I was shy. Why allow your parents label, when you were a child, to hinder your future?

6. I don’t attempt great things for God, because my family has never accomplished anything great. Why allow your family’s past to hinder its future?

7. I don’t save money, because I was told that I would always be in debt. Why allow someone’s poor thinking on money become your thinking?

8. I don’t dream, because I saw my friend dream and fail. Why not learn from failures versus become one?

9. I am not getting married because so many people get divorces. Why not learn the successful marriages versus focus on the failed ones.

10. I am not having children because the world is so messed up. Why not learn how to prepare children for life versus deny them the opportunity for life?

I could go on and on, but I think you get the point. Instead of allowing the things that you don’t control (other peoples thoughts and actions), to create your reality, why not focus on the things that you do control (your thoughts and actions)? I grew up in Columbiaville, Michigan, a small village with few, if any, big thinkers. It would have been easy to succumb to the ‘stinking thinking’ around Laurie and myself, but through God’s Grace, and a ton of effort, we broke free from the mold. Instead of dwelling on our parents faults, since all parents have them, Laurie and I focused on our parents strengths. We learned work ethic and the ability to think from our parents, and applied to every endeavor we undertook. One of the keys to breaking out is to major on your majors, not on the failed minors of others. Yes, people will let you down, shame on them, but that shouldn’t stop you from fulfilling your purpose. Yes, your family may hurt you at times, but that doesn’t stop end your responsibility to love and lead them. Yes, your vision, like a ship, may take on water every now and then, but leaders understand that it’s part of the journey, rebuilding the ship bigger and stronger. Your dream cannot be stolen, but through poor thinking, it can be surrendered. Life is much easier, since Laurie and I decided to press on regardless of the actions of others, that we were in the game no matter what. This released the stress and anxiety, felt by most people, created when not truly committed to a course of action. Leaders decide, backing the decision with full commitment, making the decision right by overwhelming passion and effort.

Did we have setbacks? Of course. Did we have people make promises while not following through? Many examples. Did we stay the course? To the best of our ability and know how, an emphatic yes. We cannot control other peoples poor decisions, but the last thing we should do, is to compound the mistake by piling on. Laurie and I have witnessed many people, with more talent than us, sabotage their own success by allowing poor thinking to take root in their minds. Usually, by the time the weeds have ruined their thinking, they no longer are interested in hearing the advice to help pull the weeds, even getting offended at the suggestion that they are growing weeds. I do my best to help point out the improper thinking, if they are willing to listen, but, at the end of the day, people are responsible for the fruit, or lack of fruit, produced in their minds, pulling weeds when identified is standard fare for leaders. Thus, one of the biggest weeds that can grow, if not pulled quickly, is permitting issues outside of your control to hinder your attitude and actions on the issues inside of your control. For example, if you aren’t reading, listening and learning daily in your chosen field, thinking what’s the use, since you aren’t getting the results in life that you want, then you are revealing a huge weed in your own thinking.

It takes time to develop master in any field, in fact it takes 10,000 hours according to Malcolm Gladwell and Geoff Colvin, both authors who write on achievement, but most quit in despair long before this. By allowing things outside of your control, a lack of 10,000 hours when you start something new, to stop you from doing what is inside of your control, building up the hours to reach 10,000 for mastery in your field, you ensure that mastery will never arrive in any field. It truly is that simple, though not that easy.

Success in life, is simply a matter of staying focused on the areas that you control, surrendering to God the areas that are outside of your control. What a leader discovers is, that others, influenced by their example, address issues, improving the community through a leader’s influence, not control. The community, inspired by the leaders courage, in confronting and changing areas of control, make the tough changes in their lives to grow. None of this would have happened, if the leader would have dwelled upon areas that he doesn’t control. It was only because the leader stayed the course, even when it hurt, that it strengthened the resolve of others to change their lives. Are you that type of leader for your family, community, and team?

One of the best decisions that a leader will ever make in life is to be “all in”, in whatever field that s/he is pursuing. Greatness doesn’t happen to those who dabble, nor to those who deliberate, but only to those who decide. Laurie and I are “all in” for our 8F’s - Faith, Family, Friends, Freedom, Finances, Fitness, Following, and Fun. What are you “all in” for in life? Life has become so much fuller by learning the secret of sacrifice. When Laurie and I sacrifice our current conveniences for our convictions, we receive a ten fold return on, not only on our own 8F’s, but also in the joy of seeing others develop their 8F’s. Look back upon your own life, didn’t you achieve more when you kept your mind focused on the areas that you could control, instead of dwelling upon what you didn’t control? Today is the day to start thinking like the leader you plan on becoming. God Bless, Orrin Woodward

MLM Scams

Give Me Liberty!

2011-06-07T07:15:00.000-04:00

History has timeless examples of leadership and courage. Here is a reprint of one of Orrin's posts highlighting an American icon, an example we should all aspire to. America is tired of being the scam being used by the elite in Washington. This is how American patriots stand against tyranny.
Enjoy!
Capt. Bill

Patrick Henry - The Seven Resolutions
by Orrin Woodward on Wed 28 Nov 2007 08:03 AM EST

This is the second part of young Patrick Henry's courageous stand for truth against the tyranny of the British King George the Third. What will Patrick Henry do? Will he stand for what he knows is right or bow to the older members? The older House members fear the King and are not representing the people they are under oath to represent. The House of Burgess began its session and by all indications it would be a few days of closing up previously discussed items. The monotonous proceedings clipped along until someone made a proposal to review all the actions the House had done in protest against the notorious Stamp Acts and consider any further steps that could be taken to convey their displeasure with the tyrannical actions of King George. Patrick Henry stood up in the opening debates with 7 resolutions he had written out on a blank page of an old law book. He drew the page from his pocket and began to read the resolutions. (I will paraphrase and abridge the resolutions.)

Resolved: That subjects of his Majesty’s colony have all privileges, franchises, and immunities (rights) enjoyed by the people in Great Britain.
Resolved: These rights have been confirmed by two royal charters.
Resolved: The taxation of the people by themselves or by a person representing them is the distinguishing mark of British freedoms.
Resolved: The Virginians have always been thus governed by their own Assemblies in the areas of taxes and internal policy.

By this point the conservative Tory members of the House were getting nervous. No one could argue with Patrick Henry’s logic or the correctness of his points. But they did not like the tone or the direction that Patrick was heading with his reasoning. In 1765, subjects did not talk like this against the King’s proclamations. Patrick Henry knew there were principles stronger than the King’s commands. Conservatives attempted to close the debate by saying they should wait until they heard from the British Ministry and Lord George Grenville on their earlier protest letter. (In fact, they never heard from Lord Grenville, author of the Stamp Act as he scarcely glanced at the protest before dumping letter into wastebasket.) After much discussion, Patrick’s first 4 resolutions were adopted by the slimmest of margins. Patrick Henry did not sit down and what happened next was a major force that changed the thinking of the colonies and forged the unity which led to the United States of America. The conservatives’ worst fears were being realized.

Resolved: That the General Assembly have the exclusive right and power to lay taxes on the subjects of the colony.
Resolved: That the subjects of this colony are not bound to obey any law designed to impose taxes upon them—other than the laws and ordinances from the General Assembly.
Resolved: Anyone maintaining a contrary opinion to this either in writing or speaking shall be considered an enemy to the Virginian Colony.

This was a new and bold innovation in the colonies. Although the Virginian colony enjoyed incredible freedom from British Parliament, it was more from neglect than by design. The British had left the Colonist alone and their freedoms had thrived. Now with the British desire for money and power they began to tax and regulate the colonist freedoms away. Patrick Henry would not take this sitting down. The fifth resolution passed by one vote, but the 6th and 7th caused an uproar amongst the members. Members attempted to shout down the 29 year old Patrick Henry. Patrick stood his ground and spoke with the eloquence of a backwoods Demosthenes.

“Tarquin and Caesar had each his Brutus, Charles the First, his Cromwell; and George the third…..”
“Treason!” cried by Speaker of the House. Numerous members of the House followed the Speaker in castigating the young leader. Patrick patiently waited for the fury to subside and continued.
“……and George the Third may profit from their example. If that be treason, make the most of it.”

The House appeared to accept all 7 resolutions, but the next day the inflammatory 6th and 7th were rejected by the more conservative majority in the House of Burgess. On the following day the 5th resolution was rejected also. Even with this setback the die was cast. The political foundations of the Virginian conservative order was cracked and soon to be broken. Copies of all 7 resolutions were sent to the other colonies and the ideas that would lead to the Revolutionary War were disseminated into the leading minds of the colonies. Here was the spark that lit the flame inside of the Revolutionary leaders burning for independence. Let me quote from George Willison’s excellent biography again:

If Virginia—the oldest, largest, richest, and traditionally the most loyal and royalist of the colonies—was prepared to take the lead in resisting British “tyranny”, why should her sister colonies hesitate to follow? The answer was: They shouldn’t. And they began organizing associations to boycott British goods and take other measure to force repeal the Stamp Tax. . . . . . . . . . .

Years later, when assessing the relative influence of American leaders on the eve of Independence, it was Jefferson, always in the vanguard himself, who said of Henry: “He left all of us far behind . . . . He gave the first impulse to the ball of Revolution . . . . He was the idol of the country beyond anyone that ever lived.”

Can one man with courage and convictions make a difference? In my reading of the Revolutionary War, I believe this single event was the catalyst that united Massachusetts and Virginia together. This unity created leadership teams across all colonies that formed together to resist the tyranny of the British tyranny. I can only imagine the amount of courage it took for a 29 year old country lawyer to stand up in front of the wealthy Virginia aristocracy and speak the truth. Where would you have stood in the Virginia House of Burgess? Would you have rationalized the wrongs for your own personal peace and affluence? Or would you have stood with the truth and young Patrick Henry. Perhaps you will have an opportunity in your life to test your courage. When you need courage, reflect back to the young lawyer from Virginia who stood up to the English empire and sparked a revolution.
God Bless,
Orrin Woodward

Orrin Woodward: The Courageous Leader

2011-05-17T21:50:00.000-04:00

Whenever someone rises above the herd, they are subjected to the ire of the critics. Their efforts are often discredited as having climbed on the backs of the less fortunate, perpetrating a scam to acheive a level of greatness. So when someone takes the time to give them an unsolicited pat on the back, it bears notice.
Enjoy!
Capt. Bill

With courage you will dare to take risks, have the strength to be compassionate, and the wisdom to be humble. Courage is the foundation of integrity. Keshavan Nair

I have attended a few Men's Leadership Seminars in Michigan where Orrin Woodward has been one of the featured speakers of the night. The one thing that has struck me is the consistency of his talks month after month. Orrin has latched on to a vision for his company. It is laser like in focus and he is motivated beyond measure to see this vision become reality.

Having vision is not enough however. Orrin Woodwardhas built his business on timeless principles of success and lives a value based life which extends into how he operates within the business world. You can see that this mentality has been effectively adopted by the senior leaders of his company and those throughout the organization. It is really amazing to see a group of business men with that type of mindset. All you have to do is read any recently published book about many of the failed major businesses in America like Enron and Global Crossing to see that the failures where aided by men who lacked the courage to lead and to stand up and do what was right.

Because Orrin Woodward has the courage to lead and to do what is right, he and his company will continue to grow and take a larger role in the US economy. You can see the tipping point coming. AOL, Wal-Mart, Dell, Microsoft, Apple, and many others had the same beginning growing and developing somewhat under the radar of the American public only to at a certain point go totally mainstream once it hit the "Tipping Point" as Malcom Gladwell says in his book. I certainly believe the same is true for Orrin Woodward and the Team.

Companies that are successful have courageous leaders willing to take risk. In my lifetime I have not seen a leader with as much conviction, passion, and courage as Orrin Woodward. I am excited to see what he and his company have planned.

An Uninvited Guest!

2011-05-08T09:47:00.000-04:00

Timeless words, timeless wisdom, by Orrin, from when government wasn't a scam on the people, but served the people!
Enjoy!
Capt. Bill

My adventure with the American election process began much like other young people entering college, not certain who the candidates were, or even what they stood for, I voted with zeal but with little knowledge. As I gained more experience, through reading newspapers and magazines, I quickly fell into the democratic herd, who spout their surface knowledge regurgitated from the morning newspaper, but understand little if any of why the system operates the way it does. I conscientiously cast my vote election after election, hoping to maintain my freedoms by the wonderful power of the democratic election process, until a curious thought entered my mind and would not leave. This uninvited guest, this alien idea would not depart, no matter how much I recited the alleged benefits of democracy. The thought was simple, but inarguable, if the key to our American freedoms is our democratic elections, if freedom is endangered when Americans neglect this right, how is it that every four years we seem to lose more of our freedoms that our vote was allegedly cast to secure, regardless of which party is elected? No one seemed to have a satisfactory answer to that question and I quickly realized that we all had the same pat answers espoused to us during our high school indoctrinations.

What if democratic voting isn’t the key to securing freedoms at all? More pointedly, if it is, why have Americans lost their freedoms at an increasing rate since we inaugurated our full fledged democracy around the turn of the 20th century? Many times, the worst of errors occur when the key to solving the problem is buried in the unquestioned assumptions of the ruling paradigm. These questions and others engaged my thoughts as I pondered America’s voting paradox, leading me on to an election epiphany-that it’s not the vote that ensures a people’s freedoms, but a contract between the rulers and the ruled. Starting with the Magna Carta written to protect English freedoms against a money hungry King John, all the freedoms of the English speaking people’s have been ensured by written contracts between the governed and the governors. Merely casting your vote, herding into schools and town halls, does not ensure anyone freedom in America. Even Adolph Hitler, that megalomaniac of power, that dictator of dictators, used the legitimate democratic election process to gain power in Germany. The more I thought, the more suspicious I became, the constant drum roll of praise beaten into me during my high-school years on the joys of our democratic process, seemed not to square with the facts, leading me to read the Founding Fathers in their own words to learn what they thought of democracy. To my great surprise, if not downright horror, I learned that democracy was the least favorable form of government in the opinion of nearly all of the Founders. Even Thomas Jefferson, one of the strongest supporters of the people, was quick to disassociate himself with democracy and stay safely under the republican banner.
If democracy isn’t working in practice, anyone alive during the last 40 years can vouch for this, and the Founding Fathers knew that it didn’t work in theory over 200 years ago, why are American’s constantly bombarded with messaging on the importance of our democratic system? With taxes increasing yearly, government regulations increasing monthly, the money supply increasing weekly, government bureaucracy increasing daily, government power increasing hourly, our national debt increasing by the minute and our freedoms waning by the second, exactly who is benefiting from this democratic process? If you answered: Politicians, Political Parties, Big Business, and Wealth Transfer Recipients; you have just qualified for double jeopardy. Edmund Burke wrote about England in the 18th century, “For us to love our county, our country ought to be lovely.” I love America and I dream of a lovely America where all races, creeds and colors can come together and unite around the idea of justice and liberty for all. The Founding Fathers didn’t trust in a democratic election process to ensure their liberties, remember many of the Founding Fathers were lawyers, writing contracts was part of any business partnership, a partnership between the people and the government required a contract to ensure the terms, that contract, written to protect the people from potential government encroachment upon their freedoms was called the American Constitution.
Contracts in business are essential, helping each side of the written agreement maintain his pledge of fidelity to the written terms, but if either side becomes negligent of the contract, abuses can and will occur. The American people have lost the understanding and intentions of the original contract, sending a clear message to government that the majority to not care to defend their freedoms, most willing to surrender their freedoms for the security of government provisions. It’s a fools game that must end in the bankruptcy of a once great country, since, if given the choice, the majority of people will choose handouts rather than work. Only through production can any country maintain its solvency, printing money is not production, borrowing money is not production, only producing goods and services that can be sold on the free market will restore the American Dream. Able bodied men and women should not be paid to idly sit by while others produce, it’s debilitating in three separate but related ways: to the self esteem of the recipients, to the total production of the country, and to the attitudes of those who are forced to work for others who do not. I don’t read a paragraph on government handouts in our written Constitution, but it’s going to take more than a few of us to read our agreement to set this straight. It’s possible for a group of people, sick and tired of voting every two years only to lose more freedoms, rising up peacefully together, to ensure that government does not encroach upon it written responsibilities.
The majority in a democracy does not have the right to vote its hands into the pockets of any its citizens anymore than an elite has a right to use government power to coerce open the pockets of the majority. The American Republic must be restored based upon the natural rights and natural law inherent in each person, as the Declaration of Independence has clearly stated. Further thoughts on our American Constitution can be found in The 5000 Year Leap by W. Cleon Skousen, a must read for any hungry student of our written contract.
Ben Franklin, one of America’s greatest Statesmen, was prophetic when, upon exiting the Constitutional Convention, he was asked what type of government America would be; he answered, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” We cannot keep our Republic since it was been lost at the turn of the 20th century, but we do have a responsibility to restore it. God Bless, Orrin Woodward

Financial Common Sense!

2011-04-24T20:30:00.000-04:00

This is a revisiting of a fantastic article leadership guru Orrin Woodward brought to light back in 2009, coupled with his unique insight on steps to balance our budget. Some principles prove themselves timeless!
Enjoy!
Capt Bill

Here is a thought provoking article from Robert Murphy. Massive government intervention is responsible for the economic mess that America is experiencing in the first place and the Obama plan adds more government intervention to allegedly get us out of the mess. I believe the Austrian economists have a better plan. I don’t care if you are a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian or other, read these proposals and think for yourself about this common sense approach. America lasted nearly 150 years without an income tax, so don’t tell me that society would crumble without it. I agree that massive government would crumble without our money, but government in America was never intended to be the behemoth that it has become. We need honorable statesmen who will balance the budget and tell Americans to work for their own rewards and not beg for government doles. Leadership is a tough business and if they can't stand the heat then they need to get out of the kitchen. Robbing our future generations to pacify slothfulness will never make America great, loved, nor respected. Immigrants flocked to America for an equal opportunity not government handouts! Why are we robbing our future generations of their opportunities to experience the hope and ideas that made America the envy of the free world for centuries?

No one can legitimately explain why we have troops in at least 135 other countries. Why should American taxpayers foot the bill for another sovereign country's defense needs? We are massively going into debt while having troops in Germany, Italy, Brazil etc. (see the complete list below) that are protecting who from what? Are you telling me that German, Italian, and Brazilian (along with the rest of the countries) cannot raise men to defend their own countries on their own dime? If a country cannot legitimately do this, then I doubt the sovereignty of the country in the first place. Can you imagine a foreign military establishment protecting our borders? This hasn’t happened since America was an English colony. America must balance our budget and having a defense budget that is nearly 10 times higher than the next nation is sheer madness. Is there not anyone capable of balancing a budget (a skill set that every American working family must do) in Washington? Read the article and please share your thoughts. God Bless, Orrin Woodward

Foreign Countries with American Troops

Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Antigua, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belgium, Belize, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burma, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Chad, Chile, China, Colombia, Congo, Costa Rica, Cote D’lvoire, Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominican Republic, East Timor, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Fiji, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Guinea, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Latvia, Lebanon, Liberia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Mali, Malta, Mexico, Mongolia, Morocco, Mozambique, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, North Korea, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia and Montenegro, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, South Africa, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe

Article by Robert Murphy - Faculty member of the Mises Institute

A lot of people get annoyed with Austrian economists because they tend to be so dogmatic (we prefer the term consistent) and because they cloak their strictly economic claims with self-righteousness (we prefer the term morality). After a good Austrian bashing of the latest call to steal taxpayer money and waste it on something that will make a given problem worse, the stumped critics will often shout, "Oh yeah? Well do you guys have a better idea?"

Now, in truth, someone doesn't have to have a better suggestion in order to point out that a recommended strategy will exacerbate the situation. If an allergic man has been stung by a bee, I don't know what to do except rush him to the hospital and maybe scour the cupboards looking for Benadryl. But I'm pretty sure drawing blood from his leg, in order to inject it into his arm and thus "stimulate his immune system," is a bad idea on numerous accounts — not least of which, is that I'm pretty sure an allergic reaction means your immune system needs to calm down. But the point is, if a bunch of guys hold the man down — he has to be forced to endure the procedure for his own good, don't you know — I feel perfectly qualified in yelling, "Stop!"

If you grasped that analogy, you can understand my feelings about anything Paul Krugman writes.

(All joking aside, I am pretty proud of the above analogy. But to make it even more accurate, let’s stipulate that a blind heroin addict, who has been convicted of manslaughter on three separate occasions, is the one entrusted with making the transfusion. Naturally he will use one of his own needles for the procedure.)

An Austrian Recommendation for President Obama

In one sense, the critics are right when they ask, "Oh, so we should just sit back and do nothing and let the market fix itself?" Yes, that would be a perfectly good idea. The whole reason we are in a recession in the first place is that the capital structure of the economy had become unsustainable due to the Fed's massive credit expansion following the dot-com bust and 9/11 attacks. Resources — most notably, labor — are currently idle, because the economy needs to readjust. Overextended lines such as housing and finance need to shrink, while others need to expand. (And no, I don't know what those understaffed lines are; that's why we have a price system.) Because Americans lived beyond their means for so many years, they now need to live below their means, consuming less while they rebuild their checking accounts and portfolios.

Given the diagnosis, we can be sure that efforts to borrow and spend our way back into prosperity, or massive bailouts of the banks and homeowners, are only pumping air into a flat tire with a gaping hole. And Bernanke's unbelievable injections of new funny money into the credit markets will only ensure that those failed institutions remain afloat, paralyzing true recovery in the loan market, and risking very large price inflation if Bernanke does not soon reverse course.

However, even though "nothing" would be much, much better than all of the alleged remedies being bandied about, the Austrians actually do have concrete proposals for President Obama. The following list includes items that I would have endorsed even before the crisis, but inasmuch as they would definitely help things, I offer them with sincerity to the new administration.

One last caveat: I know there are many purists who read the Mises Daily, and will be aghast at my watered-down recommendations. Yes, yes, I agree that the best thing would be for Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and all my friends to say, "You know, if you look at the history of this company, it always ends up wasting money and getting innocent people killed. I think we should just quit and go volunteer at a church instead."

But, if I said that as an Austrian recommendation, it would be dismissed as "unserious," a very grave charge indeed. Thus, the following list of recommendations are not politically impossible, just exceedingly unlikely:

Eliminate the personal and corporate income tax. Don't put in a flat tax or a fair tax or a VAT or any other cute name for a very uncute process. To make sure that individuals and corporations realize you are serious, blow up the IRS building. (Have everyone vacate the premises first, of course.) Tell all of the displaced workers that they have 9 months of full pay, plus whatever pension and health-care benefits they had contractually earned to that point. If the workers get new jobs 3 days after being laid off from the IRS, that's fine; they still get their full 9 months' pay. But if they haven't found a new job after 9 months, tough.

Unfortunately, dismantling the Social Security system will have to wait. (That means some of the IRS personnel would — sigh — have to be retained. But they would move to a different building.) Getting rid of the income tax will knock out much of the federal revenues, and taking out all payroll "contributions" would take us into the realm of "unserious." Note that in 2007, even without the personal and corporate income tax, the federal government still took in more than $1 trillion in receipts.

The loss of some $1.5 trillion in annual tax receipts sounds absurd, but the actual figure would be lower, because of "supply-side" effects. That is, the true stimulus to the economy from such an enormous tax cut would cause the revenues from other sources to grow. So long as the federal budget were cut by, say, a trillion dollars, within a few years it would be in the black.

Reducing annual federal expenditures by $1 trillion sounds inconceivable, but it actually could be phased in. The government has many assets that it could auction off into private hands, so that in the first year or two, the government could take certain programs and say, "This will have its budget cut by one-third over each of the next three years." The auction receipts would fill the gap until these phased-in reductions had fully occurred. Some of the obvious auction items would be the oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (current value of about $35 billion at $50/bbl oil), as well as all of the mineral deposits (both onshore and offshore) technically owned by the federal government. It is difficult to come up with an estimate of how much the latter properties would fetch in an auction, since the proposals right now are for leasing extraction rights. But since the Outer Continental Shelf is estimated to have some 86 billion barrels of oil, presumably the government could receive many hundreds of billions of dollars — and possibly trillions — from an orderly and staggered sale over a few years of the most lucrative (and environmentally noncontroversial) lands.

Now, where to start cutting?

Eliminate the DEA and the SEC. Since the SEC failed to catch Madoff, despite nine years of warnings, I think its $950 million annual budget is obviously a waste of money. The DEA's $1.9 billion budget in 2007 also strikes me as counterproductive. Beyond the issues of violent gangs and judicial corruption, there is the fact that this is a recession and we need to cut costs. If you're afraid of your kid doing drugs, have a serious talk and then make him watch this movie. And if he's still keen on the idea, I'm not sure the DEA is going to stop him. (By the way, the DEA and SEC employees get the same deal as the laid-off IRS personnel.)

Cut the Pentagon budget in half. In FY 2008 it was (officially) some $460 billion, so that cut alone would free up $230 billion per year. This isn't an article about foreign policy, so we won't be specific about how the military could achieve such cuts. But if you're worried that the country would suddenly be overrun by Iranian tanks, the following chart should reassure you:

Top 10 Countries by Military Expenditure, 2007

Eliminate the Department of Education. That would save $68.6 billion a year, based on its latest budget. Does anyone want to argue that Americans are well educated? And incidentally, I was a college professor for a few years, so I can say from personal experience that there are way too many kids going to college. If you think "everyone should get a college degree," let me ask you this: Should everyone get a PhD? If not, then why a bachelor's degree? The more kids crammed into the school, the harder it is to teach to the truly academic, and the less of a signal the diploma provides. Plus, $68.6 billion is some serious money.

Cancel all the pending "stimulus" and other bailout packages. Tell the Big Three that small is beautiful. Tell the banks, "OK your 'short-term' loan from the Fed has expired, here are your mortgage-backed securities back, and we'll be taking our reserves. Good luck to you. This is a capitalist country, where you keep your earnings if you forecast well (we just eliminated the income tax!) and where you go bust if you don't realize real estate sometimes drops. Have a nice day." Yes, this would cause some banks to immediately go bankrupt, but the big banks aren't doing anything now anyway. The dreaded liquidation would actually wipe the slate clean so recovery could begin. As it is, trillions of dollars in capital is now locked up in undead institutions that can't make new loans but won't mark their assets at true values, since they are insolvent. And with the income tax being wiped out, the toxicity of these troubled assets would come way down.

Allow unrestricted immigration so long as the incoming folks had a secure job in which the employer (a) paid three years in advance on any state and local taxes that would accrue from the employment and (b) bought at least a $100,000 house for the immigrant and his or her family. (Yes, yes, the last point is silly, but it will help sell the package.)

Abolish the minimum wage. That — coupled with the elimination of the income tax — will take care of unemployment within 6 months.

The above steps are incomplete, and I'm sure many readers will email me with snags in them. Fair enough. But I am confident that the above would make a heck of a lot more sense than letting blind heroin addicts borrow an extra trillion dollars to "stimulate" the economy.

Robert Murphy, an adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute and a faculty member of the Mises University, runs the blog Free Advice and is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, the Study Guide to Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, and the Human Action Study Guide.

Mentoring Is Giving!

2011-04-17T19:19:00.000-04:00

I read a fantastic article by Rick Beneteau on giving and listening. It reminded me of the role of mentoring in helping someone think properly through their life. Life can be tough and it certainly isn’t always a bed of roses. If life is tough for everyone, why do some people seem to ride the waves from peak to peak, but others are buried by the waves? I believe it is not what happens to you in life, but how you think about what happens to you in life that matters most. Do you see your current challenges, roadblocks, and setbacks as evidence of no opportunity or do you see the same situations as evidence that God has a BIG plan for you! Think about it for a minute! If God is calling you for a big assignment—wouldn’t it make sense that He would place some major challenges in your life to develop character first? God must develop the person for the assignment given and challenges are a great way to develop the necessary character for advanced assignments. Instead of fighting our fate, let’s be drawn to our destiny!

When Laurie and I sit down to mentor couples, we tell them to share with us the good, the bad, and the ugly. We are not listening so we can have a pity party with the couple. We listen to celebrate the good, make adjustments for the bad and address the ugly immediately. Every great leader has had good, bad and ugly things happen to them, but the key is how they are thinking through the situations. How are you thinking through the good, the bad, and the ugly in your life? Do you secretly enjoy the bad and the ugly things that are happening? Many people surprisingly do! The reason for this secret enjoyment is they feel it justifies their lack of results and causes others to feel sorry for them. DO NOT EVER PLAY THE ROLE OF VICTIM! It may feel good to have others feel sorry for you, but it is a drug that creates a harmful life addiction. YOU are a champion and all champions will have to overcome the bad and the ugly in their life. We are not training people to be victims, so take the bad things that happen to you as God’s way of developing character. The greatest gift a mentor can give to you is the absolute belief that you have what it takes inside of you to overcome your present difficulties and win in the game of life. Laurie and I believe strongly that all of us have what it takes and we have dedicated our life to teach others how to think through their difficulties to be champions in the game of life! We must give to others, but the best thing to give to others is a champion’s way of thinking through life. Anything else that we give to them is giving less than our personal best! God Bless, Orrin Woodward

"Give 'til it hurts." You've probably heard this a thousand times. I know I have. A well-intentioned expression that I always found somewhat strange as "giving" and "hurt" are concepts that seem to be polar opposite.

I want to share with you a personal story where "giving" in fact "hurt" a person I was trying to help. In order to do that, I need to give you a little background about myself. Please indulge me.

For whatever reason the universe has, I have been blessed to have had many people seek my counsel during my fifty years of living. They trusted that I could help them in some way.

I've been told that I am a good listener. Coupled with an inherent desire to help others, even during my high school days, I seemed to become the counselor of choice for many of my peers.

I vividly recall private chats I had with my high school cohorts, normally conducted in my sooped-up '67 ‘Cuda, during lunch, spare periods or skipped-out classes. Problems about girlfriends, boyfriends, teachers and parents were the norm. Usually self- esteem issues were at the core, as is the case with most problems thirty years later.

And later, my twenty-and-thirty-something friends and family members, as well as many of the employees in my drycleaning business, could always count on complete confidence and my objectivity when discussing problems that they had in their personal lives.

As life moved along, I was faced with a myriad of not only challenges to overcome, but tragedies to deal with. The death of two of my siblings, my father and many close family members and friends, business losses, divorce and being the parent of a special needs child were among them. The lessons learned and the strength gained from these life experiences ultimately led to what I have chosen to do with my life today.

But being pretty well-schooled in life does not always mean that one has the right answers though.

He has been in my life a long time. I was mostly always on the listening end. Conversation after conversation he would laundry-list his assorted problems. And, as many "victims of life" have it, they were never in short supply. I would allow him to "share" his stories of suffering, time after time, consuming much of mine. Like the traditional psychologist, I would just listen, as I felt listening was a large part of "my role" in trying to help him.

Thing was, no matter what suggestions I would offer to try to help him, the problems not only remained, but amplified over time. He never acted on my advice and I eventually began to feel rather impotent and confused about how I could make a difference in his life.

Suddenly, in a conversation last year, at a point where I became very irritated at listening to his negativity, it struck me. This person was receiving so much more benefit from knowing I was listening to him spew about his miserable life than he ever would from finding solutions and improving it. It finally dawned on me that he LOVED having problems!

I hadn't helped him. Not one bit. In fact, for years, I was simply feeding this need in him. I was helping him to have a great time at his own pity party. All this time my giving was, in fact, hurting him!

He was shocked when I interrupted him mid-sentence and blurted out that I didn't want to listen to any more about his problems. There was an awkward silence but when he finally asked me "why" I quickly reassured him that I was still interested in helping him. But it was not going to be on his terms anymore. The new deal would have to be that from this conversation forward, we would not discuss the past. Only the present and future. We would address current issues by working on solutions. He would need to act on my suggestions. Things such as reading certain books or listening to certain tapes and making small adjustments in his thinking that would produce positive results. Our future conversations would consist only of discussing the changes he would sincerely attempt to make to improve his life. He seemed somewhat stunned, and reluctantly agreed.

Those next few times we talked though he tried very hard to steer the conversation down his familiar road attempting to inform me of the latest, greatest grief in his life. But I didn't allow that, sticking to the agreed-upon plan and changing direction to our new proactive approach.

You know what? It really didn't take too long before the tone of our conversations became more positive in nature and soon he was beginning to "get" some important concepts about how his mind, and the universe, really worked. He started reading and listening to materials I suggested. He was beginning to learn that his current results were the product of his current thinking and that he was never a victim of life – not for one minute! That growth has continued.

Now we have great talks, often upbeat, and any real problem he has is briefly outlined and then discussed in such a way that a solution can be found and acted upon. In fact, I've become comfortable sharing some of my problems with him! More than once he's reminded me to take some of my own medicine!

It's both magical and comforting to me at the same time to know that when the simple truths of how things work in this world are realized, things can really begin to change for the better and in a big way. It's unfortunate that it took so long for me to realize how I could better serve my friend, but then, the universe has it's own timing for things like this.

It is my hope that if you have been trying to help someone like my friend and find yourself doing a lot of "listening", that just maybe, your giving is hurting.

Leadership and Systems Thinking!

2011-04-10T09:48:00.000-04:00

Have you ever watched a team of mountain climbers scale a cliff? I have watched with awe as the mountain climbers work together, as a team, to pull of this feat. Imagine five climbers, all connected together by ropes and pulleys, ensuring the safety of all, scaling a cliff thousands of feet up. The five climbers are a system, each action by one of the climbers affects the actions of the rest. No climber could choose to scale the cliff if the others, were resting. In fact, no four of the climbers could scale the cliff if just one chose to stop. The ropes magnify the interdependence between the individuals, but with or without the ropes, people in communities are part of a system, being interdependent upon one another. Each person in a community needs to understand systematic thinking as their actions will affect all others in the community. Every leader must learn to think systematically in order to lead to his full potential. Systems thinking is the process of understanding how individual parts influence one another within the entity as a whole. Both nature and organizations are filled with systems. Nature is filled with ecosystems involving air, water, plants, animals and more in systems to sustain life, while organizational systems consist of people, structures, and processes that interact to produce results. Whether the results are good or bad depends upon the system interactions orchestrated by the leader.

Remember the story of the elephant and the blind men? This is an excellent example displaying systems thinking. Read it again, thinking through how portions of truth must be combined (like a system) to gain the entire truth.

Once upon a time, there lived six blind men in a village. One day the villagers told them, "Hey, there is an elephant in the village today." They had no idea what an elephant is. They decided, "Even though we would not be able to see it, let us go and feel it anyway." All of them went where the elephant was. Everyone of them touched the elephant.

"Hey, the elephant is a pillar," said the first man who touched his leg.

"Oh, no! it is like a rope," said the second man who touched the tail.

"Oh, no! it is like a thick branch of a tree," said the third man who touched the trunk of the elephant.

"It is like a big hand fan" said the fourth man who touched the ear of the elephant.

"It is like a huge wall," said the fifth man who touched the belly of the elephant.

"It is like a solid pipe," Said the sixth man who touched the tusk of the elephant.

They began to argue about the elephant and everyone of them insisted that he was right. It looked like they were getting agitated, each blind man wondering how the others could be so stupid. Each believing they had the truth, since he felt it with his own hands. A wise man was passing by and he saw this. He stopped and asked them, "What is the matter?" They said, "We cannot agree to what the elephant is like." Each one of them told what he thought the elephant was like. The wise man calmly explained to them, "All of you are right and all of you are wrong. The reason each of you is telling it differently is because each one of you touched a different part of the elephant. Each of you has a partial truth. The elephant has all the features that each of you described, but isn’t fully what you described unless you combine all of your answers."

Each of the blind men has touched upon a truth of the elephant, but individually, none of them had the whole truth. If they had spent their time arguing, insisting upon the truth of what they had felt with their own hands, the community would have broken down, forming individual perceptions and not gaining a system perspective of the truth. Only when each individual learns that they are part of a system, touching upon truth at some point, but probably not touching upon the total systematic truth, will each teammate seek out alternative perspectives. Many times, disagreements are not really disagreements at all, but just individuals seeing or feeling a different aspect of the system, revealing a portion of the truth, that only when combined yields the whole truth. System thinking is essential for leaders to help everyone work as a team, gathering all of the facts to accurately model the system they are working on to improve. Without a systems perspective, the leader quickly takes sides with one of his personal favorites, forcing others to comply with his partial interpretation of the truth, killing his credibility, alienating many of his teammates, destroying the motivation to share alternative perspectives in the future.

I love the blind men analogy. If leaders will remember the lesson of the blind men, their ability to solve problems will greatly increase, no longer satisfied with portions of the truth, they will seek out all perspectives to gain a larger view of reality. Let’s discuss another example of systems thinking. I believe I heard a version of this story first from Stephen Covey. Covey uses the example of a fishermen going to a river to enjoy a day of fishing, but just minutes after getting there, he sees a young boy flailing his arms in the middle of the river, screaming for help. The fishermen jumps in and save him. The boy is healthy, so the fishermen starts fishing, but fifteen minutes later, a young girl is flailing her arms, yelling for help, in the middle of the river. The fishermen saves her also. At this point, he ponders what the odds are, that two people would need saving on the same day. Fifteen minutes later, when a third child needs to be rescued, he is certain that there must be more to the picture (system), than he is touching upon. At this point, he starts asking questions, no longer believing that the children who needed rescuing, are isolated events. He believes there is more to this system than is meeting his eyes. The fishermen, deciding to solve the cause at its roots, not just continue to trim at the leaves, walks upstream, discovering a children’s camp. The fishermen finds that the local bully, doing what bullies do, was throwing kids in the river every fifteen minutes, and would continue to do so, until everyone surrendered their money. The fishermen, a true problem solver, took the bully by the ear, walked him into the camp office, solved the root cause of the problem (the bully), and enjoyed the remaining fishing time in peace.

I know the example is simplistic, but it does capture the main points in systematic thinking. Many times in life, people run from emergency to emergency, never stopping to think if the emergencies are related systematically. The simple system described above included the boys and girls, the bully, the river, and the fishermen downstream. The fishermen would have had a busy day, if he hadn’t solved the problem at its root. You can stay busy your entire life, but unless you are solving problems at the root, nothing of long-term consequence is being solved. Busy is not the goal, but productivity is. As Covey teaches, one can trim the leaves for life, but if you wish to eliminate a tree, one must attack the roots. Toyota has a problem solving system that helps discover the root causes, called the Five Whys. It teaches that most root causes are at least five questions removed from the issue that is being addressed at the moment. The root cause is usually not the first why, but, if one will keep asking questions, the root cause will typically be revealed.

For example, if someone slips and falls on a slippery factory floor, breaking their arm in the process, the quick solution is to order a cleaning crew to work more hours, cleaning the floors daily to ensure a non-slippery surface. A non-slippery floor is the right answer, but before hiring extra people, spending money and time on the problem, the Five Why’s would attempt to discover the root cause (like the bully in example above). Leaders aren’t happy with just trimming the leaves, while the root cause remains unaddressed and will use the Five Why’s to help determine the root issues. The Five Whys in this example would go something like this:

Q: Why did the man slip and fall?

A: Because the ground was slippery.

Q: Why was the ground slippery?

A: Because there was oil on the floor.

Q: Why was there oil on the floor?

A: Because one of the machines was leaking oil.

Q: Why was the machine leaking oil?

A: Because an oil pan bolt was loose.

Why was the oil pan bolt loose?

A: Because the machine vibrated the bolt loose.

Q: Why did the machine vibrate the bolt loose?

A: Because the shaft bearing is worn out in the machine.

Q: Why is the shaft bearing worn out in the machine?

A: Because maintenance hasn’t changed it and it is past it’s useable life.

Q: Why haven’t they changed out the old bearing?

A: Because we cut all preventative maintenance in a cost cutting measure.

The Five Why’s has revealed the systematic issue in the factory system, not just the obvious answer of cleaning up the oil. When the preventative maintenance program was eliminated, in an effort to save money, it brought upon other effects, not clearly understood at the time. If another department has to hire more cleaning crews, or paying overtime to existing ones, then we have not really saved any money, but still have a maintenance issue. This only compounds the factories problems further, having not understood the systematic effects of the choices made. Trimming the leaves by cutting preventative maintenance, but causing a bigger root problem, by machines failing over time. Without the proper machine maintenance, further degradation is inevitable, leading to more trimming leaves behavior, while the root cause, the improper maintenance, ruins the productivity and safety of the entire factory. Only when the leader thinks systematically, will the root cause be revealed. Preventative maintenance will be reinstated; machines run with quality bearings; the bolts will stay tight; the oil remains in the pan; and people can walk the floor without endangering their safety. The factory is a system, every action performed by one department will have effects on numerous others departments. It’s only when the leader thinks of the entire system (elephant above), that the entire truth will be revealed, leading to decisions made upon the total systems, not just the partial truths that each department feels. God Bless, Orrin Woodward

Character and Integrity= Courage!

2011-04-05T18:24:00.002-04:00

I resolve to focus on character more than reputation, knowing that character is who I am and reputation is only what others say that I am.

“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.” - Abraham Lincoln

Character is that special quality, that makes men and women, who have it, appear larger than life. Character is more than just what a person says or does, rather, it’s what a person is. Words like honorable, honest, trustworthy, dutiful, and fidelity, describe the person with integrity, in any field of endeavor. But character moves beyond integrity, since integrity is ‘not doing wrong,’ while character is moves beyond that into ‘doing right’. For example, if someone is picking on little Billy at school, but a person didn’t participate, then he displayed integrity by not doing wrong. But to display character, a person must move beyond integrity, having the courage to defend young Billy against his oppressors, risking his personal peace and affluence for the sake of justice. In other words, integrity refuses to do wrong, but character is more demanding, expecting people to have the courage to do right. By helping Billy, a person moves from integrity to character through his display of courage. John Wooden, one of the all-time great basketball coaches, and life coaches, said, ““Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.” Character then, if displayed as a mathematical formula would be: Character = Integrity * Courage. If one doesn’t have integrity, then displaying courage doesn’t give him character. For example, many bank robbers had courage, but not integrity, thus not character. But, one can also have integrity, but no courage, thus lack character through not standing up for principle when required by justice. Character, in other words, requires massive courage to ‘do right,’ especially in the current pragmatic culture that expects timidity, even when gross injustices are routinely performed. Most people will mind their own business, leaving the oppressors a free hand to abuse the victims, but people of character will have none of this. As Reverend Martin Niemoeller, a Nazi prison camp survivor, said, “First they arrested the Communists - but I was not a Communist, so I did nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats - but was not a Social Democrat, so I did nothing. Then they arrested the trade unionists - and I did nothing because I was not one. And then they came for the Jews and then the Catholics, but I was neither a Jew nor a Catholic and I did nothing. At last they came and arrested me - and there was no one left to do anything about it.” Character is essential for all true success, for without it, nations, corporations, charities, and families are destroyed. God Bless, Orrin Woodward

Humor Relief

2011-03-11T18:09:00.003-05:00

In times of crisis, leaders must be able to reduce a problem to real-world standards and bring it into a manageable perspective. They must be able to see the comedic aspects of the situation and clear the stress, anxiety and tension from the air through their own sense of humor.

Your people need this type of release in order to relax, reevaluate, and reprioritize their goals. Then they can refocus on what really needs to be done to correct the problems they face and get the job done.

That simple "humor relief" created by a leader can be the difference between success and failure. A true leader understands the importance of reframing perspective through humor.

Humor is an affirmative of dignity; a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.
Romain Gary

http://team_orrin_woodward.typepad.com/

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A Vision for the Future

2011-03-07T17:56:00.003-05:00

The future represents what is new. It represents change and innovation. It represents hope and the results of past efforts, attitudes and growth.

The present is important for it is in the present that we achieve the future, and we must learn from the past, our successes and failures. But the future provides a vision not yet attained-- a target to aim for.

A true leader understands the importance of having a clearly defined vision for success and is effective in communicating that vision to the team.

I like the dreams of the future, better than the history if the past.
Thomas Jefferson

http://team_orrin_woodward.typepad.com/

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Location:Dallas/Fort Worth Airport

The Leadership Role

2011-03-02T17:42:00.009-05:00

To be appointed to a leadership position is not sufficient to make you a leader.

Leadership is not based upon position. That's management. Once appointed to a position of leadership, you have to take charge and begin leading.

Too many people feel as though they have arrived when they get promoted. The wise know that promotion is just the beginning. It is the opportunity to lead!

A leader who assumes the leadership role is much more effective than those who try to succeed by mere position. But those under the purview of that leadership soon discover the lack thereof.

It is easier to assume your role as a leader once you understand that people want and need to be led by a competent leader. You are there to help them, and yourself, by giving them direction through being the example.

When in charge, take charge!

http://team_orrin_woodward.typepad.com/

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Location:AA Flight from Tucson to Dallas

Leadership Process

2011-02-27T08:29:00.000-05:00

Becoming a leader is an incremental process.

Becoming an effective supervisor requires certain skills.

Becoming an effective manager requires another set of skills.

In that same regard, becoming an effective leader requires yet another set of skills. Skills that can all be learned, developed, and honed by anyone motivated and disciplined to do so.
Developing these skills is the formula for your success.

Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

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Solution Oriented

2011-02-25T17:32:00.005-05:00

True leaders are constantly seeking solutions.

One seldom has to look for problems. Problems have a natural way of making themselves known.

One does, however, have to look for solutions to those problems.

Rather than expend wasted energy worrying and placing blame, leaders are solution-oriented seeking to just solve the problem. They then go one step further to learn from the mistakes and take action to ensure that a similar problem does not occur in the future. True leaders learn from problems and teach the lesson for greater growth of the team.

The block of granite which is an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, becomes a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.
Thomas Carlyle

http://www.thesocialleader.com/2010/01/social-leader-spotlight-orrin-woodward-founder-team/

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Competent Teamates

2011-02-21T17:25:00.010-05:00

Leaders are not afraid of their teammates or subordinates taking their jobs.

Quite the contrary, leaders recruit the best people they can find and train them thoroughly so they can not only do their job, but so they can fill in for the leader when necessary.

This ensures that the team and the leader gets maximum performance, maximum results and success into the future. This is part of Maxwell's Law of Legacy- A leader’s lasting value is measured by succession.

Quality followers, teammates, and subordinates are a result of, and a course of, strong true leadership.

There is something that is much more scarce, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.
Robert Half

http://www.thesocialleader.com/2010/01/social-leader-spotlight-orrin-woodward-founder-team/

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Common Sense

2011-02-18T17:19:00.002-05:00

Leaders Exhibit Good Common Sense.

Are people born with common sense? Maybe.
Is it the result of experience? Possibly.
Is it the combination of IQ, acquired knowledge and personal experience?
Probably!

Experts and know-it-alls can argue what constitutes common sense until the end of time but the fact remains that a true leader has it and uses it. Period!

Common sense is the knack of saying things as they are, and doing as they ought to be done.
Josh Billings

http://team_orrin_woodward.typepad.com/

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Taking Risks

2011-01-30T17:34:00.002-05:00

Leaders take calculated risks.

Leaders are not foolhardy, wild-eyed maniacs who throw away the rule book.

On the contrary: leaders continually evaluate the elements of a risky project in comparison to the potential for gain from taking those risks.

They speak out in the heat of controversy. They take a stand when right, but not necessarily popular. They dare to try new ideas, sure in their own minds that their ideas will work.

They do not risk the safety of their subordinates or someone else's career-- only their own.

If nothing is ever ventured, then nothing is ever gained.

It is impossible to win the great prizes of life without running risks.
Theodore Roosevelt

The Social Leader on Orrin Woodward

Strive to be the Best

2011-01-20T17:37:00.002-05:00

Leaders strive to be the best in everything they do.

Leaders also instill this attribute into their subordinates.

Leaders seek to be the best-- for their own satisfaction in knowing they can be.

Get a good idea and stay with it. Dog it, and work at it until it's done and done right.
Walt Disney

The Best Leadership Nuggets

Take Responsibility

2011-01-10T17:36:00.001-05:00

True leaders are in charge, and they are responsible for every facet of the project or task at hand.

When it is successful, they are the ones responsible. When it is unsuccessful, they are also responsible.

Taking responsibility relieves others, and shows them who the true leader really is. Anyone can choose to be a leader and accept responsibility.

A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He says, "I was beaten." He does not say, "My men were beaten." Thus speaks a real man.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

WOW- The House Actually Reads the Constitution

2011-01-06T19:52:00.000-05:00

This article is greatly encouraging if it is true!? This country became great as a result of following its charter. The same country has fallen by ignoring it. Restoration is so desperately needed if we are to once again be that shining light set upon a hill.

Constitution Frames Controversies in Congress

Posted by Jennifer Mesko

The U.S. House of Representatives launched the 112th session of Congress today with a recitation of the U.S. Constitution. It was the first time the document has been read in its entirety on the House floor.

“This historic and symbolic reading is long overdue and shows that the new majority in the House truly is dedicated to our Constitution and the principles for which it stands,” said Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., who proposed the idea.
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said the reading of the Constitution “demonstrates a renewed commitment to following our nation’s charter text.”

“That guiding document is founded upon the transcendent truth that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are rights endowed by our Creator. It defines the roles, duties and limits of federal governance. As such, the Constitution ensures that if followed with integrity and diligence, our Republic and the ordered liberty we enjoy within it will remain strong and vibrant.”
Not everyone, however, was pleased with the reading.

“They are reading it like a sacred text,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., told The Washington Post. He called the “ritualistic reading” on the floor “total nonsense” and “propaganda” intended to claim the document for Republicans.

And the controversy over the Constitution didn’t end there.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is being criticized for accepting an invitation from Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., to speak to Congress about the Constitution on Jan. 24.
The meeting “suggests an alliance between the conservative members of the court and the conservative members of Congress,” Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, told the Los Angeles Times. He said Scalia had shown “exceedingly poor judgment.”

Ezra Klein, a liberal blogger for The Washington Post, went so far as to call the founding document “impossible to understand because it’s over 100 years old.”

Edward Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a former clerk to Scalia, disputed the criticism.
“(Is it) improper for any justice ever to speak to any group of members of Congress who might be perceived as sharing the same general political disposition?” he asked. “My guess is that, schedule permitting, Scalia would be happy to speak on the same topic to any similar group of members of Congress who invited him,” Whelan told the Times.

Even the editorial board at the Los Angeles Times came to Scalia’s defense.
“We find it hard to share the outrage,” they wrote. “We disagree with many of Scalia’s views. … Still, he is a learned and provocative legal thinker. If Congress is going to conduct an adult education course on the Supreme Court, his views belong in the curriculum.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Visit the U.S. House home page.
Read the Constitution.
Read the Los Angeles Times editorial.
Learn more about Justice Antonin Scalia.

Adversity or Opportunity

2011-01-06T17:35:00.002-05:00

We've all heard "When handed a lemon, make lemonade."

The leader follows this advice and looks for any opportunity to combat, and thrive against, adversity.

Every cloud has a silver lining. True leaders look for that silver lining at every opportunity of adversity.

Since the house is on fire, let us warm ourselves.
Italian Proverb

The Social Leader on Orrin Woodward

Just One Word – Part 1

2011-01-04T10:49:00.011-05:00

As a Board Member for the local FCA here in Michigan, I frequently read some great articles as a part of the Resources available through FCA. The following is an article I read last week that is a great way to bring focus to your New Year. I hope you enjoy it and take advantage of the wonderful resources FCA has to offer. Happy New Year!

Just One Word – Part 1

By Dan Britton

Posted December 28, 2010

Ready:

"Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus."
-Philippians 3:13-14

Set:

It’s hard to simplify life. Narrowing the focus seems impossible. Over this past year, I know you have been asked hundreds of time, “How is it going?” Your response was probably something like mine: “I have been SO busy!” I haven't heard one person respond: “I’ve had so much time on my hands, and I’m looking for something new to do.” I would love to meet that person.

As an athlete or coach, you have tons of responsibilities, and your schedule is crazy. You feel like you are sprinting on the field and sprinting in life. That is why we need to be intentional about clarifying and simplifying life. For the past eight years, I have been sharing with many people the simple discipline of picking just one word as a theme for the upcoming year. That is right, a ONE-word theme. Not a phrase, not a statement, just a single word. And to this point, it has been nothing short of life-changing.

In the movie City Slickers, there is a scene that reveals the value and magnitude of "one thing." Billy Crystal plays Mitch, a vacationing businessman who, along with two friends, takes on the adventure of a cattle drive. In the middle of the drive, a rough-necked cowhand named Curly tells Mitch that the secret to life is just one thing. Curly emphasizes the point by holding one finger up and saying, "You need to stick to that one thing." To this, Mitch replies, "What is that one thing?" Curly responds back, "That is what you gotta figure out."

Curly is not a Bible scholar, but he does recognize the power of just one thing. Even though the Bible does not have the phrase "one-word theme," it is interesting to note that the phrase "one thing" appears five times in the Bible: once in Philippians and four times in the Gospels.

In Philippians 3:13-14, Paul uses the phrase "one thing" to bring focus and clarity to his calling. In Luke 10:42 Jesus says to Martha, "only one thing is needed." Both Luke 18:22 and Mark 10:21 include His words to the rich man and express a lack of "one thing." John 9:25 also includes this phrase as the blind man tells the Pharisees, "One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!"

In the same way that Scripture uses these words, we also can put it to use by asking God to reveal a one-word theme for us for the upcoming year.

For me, this one-word exercise, in its simplicity, helps bring clarity into a very complex world. The discipline of picking a one-word theme has stretched me in all areas—spiritually, physically and emotionally. God has transformed me in many ways through this exercise, and I know that through it God can bring truth and revelation into your life, as well.

When I first started this process, half of the fun was choosing the word for the year, but I have learned that it is not necessarily me who chooses the word, but rather God who reveals it to me. God can, indeed, drop an anointed, specific word into your soul. In my first year, I admit that it was 99 percent me picking the word and 1 percent God speaking. Even so, God still used it! But as I have become more experienced in the process, I have learned to really listen and watch for God's leading in selecting the word.

It has been my experience that God quickly reveals His plans for the year regarding your one-word. That word (be it a discipline, fruit of the Spirit, character trait, attribute of God or even the name of a person) will brand you for life! Every day, you'll be blessed as you experience God revealing to you powerful truth about your one-word theme. Everywhere you turn, there will be new insights and valuable lessons associated with that word.

Enjoy the process, and remember: just one word. Not a phrase. Not even two words. Just one word!

Go:

1. Why is it so hard to simplify life?
2. Why do you think we try to impress people with more rather than less?
3. How do you answer the question, "How are you doing?" Does the word "busy" always come out? How can you respond differently?
4. What did Paul say his one thing was in Philippians 3:13-14?
5. What is God saying to you now about your one-word theme for 2011? Commit some serious time to praying and asking God to speak to you.

Workout:

Luke 10:42
Luke 18:22
Mark 10:21
John 9:25

Overtime:

"Lord, as I get ready to start 2011, I ask that You would make it a life-changing year. I want to live for You alone. Reveal Yourself to me as You show me what my one-word theme will be. Fill me with Your Holy Spirit. I realize that it is a journey of learning, not a task to accomplish. Through this process, I desire to know You better. Strengthen me as I live out this word every day."

Become a WisdomWalker! WisdomWalks.org

Bible Book: John, Luke, Mark, Philippians

Bible Chapter: John 9, Luke 10, Luke 18, Mark 10, Philippians 3

Collection: Daily Impact Play

Keywords: Impressing Others, Simplifying Life, WisdomWalks

Leading the Pack

2010-12-31T16:49:00.002-05:00

Leaders stay a little more progressive.

The do so by:
Being a little more innovative. A little more creative.
By taking that extra step.
Spending a little more effort.
Getting a little more accomplished.
Getting a few more results.

However, leaders can't run too far ahead of the pack without bringing others with them. They need support from others to be successful themselves. Leaders stay ahead but make sure others are with them.

It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.
Winston Churchill

Keep Moving Forward

2010-12-29T07:39:00.001-05:00

Leaders are always going forward making progress in some fashion. Sometimes in tiny steps, but often in quantum leaps.

A leader's group is the first to adopt new ideas, first to try new technologies, and first in efficiency and productivity. They pay attention to percentage points of increase and decrease. They pay attention to the score.

True leaders make things happen.

Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.
Arthur Godfrey

Ask Yourself Big Questions

2010-12-27T10:54:00.001-05:00

I recently read this article & thought it to be timely with the New Year almost upon us. Take heed of the questions proffered & sincerely contemplate where you are and where you want to truly be.

Ask Yourself Big Questions
By Tom Stevens (c)2007

Consider the two following questions.
What are the goals for my business this year?
What would the world miss if my business didn’t exist?
Both are important, but for very different reasons – and they will impact your thinking in very different ways.

For most questions, value is derived primarily from arriving at an answer. The first question above is useful because its answer holds valuable information. Once you arrive at the answer, you are done. You proceed by taking action on the information, in the current example by ensuring that your activities and plans align with your goals.

How the second question differs is that great value is contained in what is NOT answered. While it is obvious you get nowhere without some coherent answer for this type of question, you are best served by keeping your answer always open, a work in progress. It is the unanswered part that keeps your mind searching, giving you potential for deeper insight.

I refer to these types of questions as BIG questions. Big questions, by their nature, provoke us into thinking in new ways. Big questions take us into the heart of what really matters. Keeping a big question in front of you for an extended period of time keeps your subconscious and well as conscious mind digging for insight.

We rely on questions of the first type for everyday effectiveness in our work. What are our goals and objectives? Did we generate sufficient revenue? What does the customer want? Were deliveries made on time?

Questions of the second type, big questions, help us arrive at what differentiates our organization from our competitors, what we are passionate about, what makes our effort worthwhile.

The big question above is a variant of the ‘George Bailey question’ (as in the movie, It’s A Wonderful Life). A personal version would be, “what would the world miss if you didn’t exist?”

Below are seven other big questions to ponder. Some you have likely seen before, some not, but each has the potential to stimulate important insight.

If you started from scratch, would you do what you now do? If not, what are you going to do about it?
What would make you excited – joyful, exuberant, energized – to get up each morning?
If you were guaranteed success, what would you do?
What are your fears? What would you do if you were not afraid?
What is the experience you want from life? What is the experience you want other people to have of you? (Don’t forget, what experience does your business give your customers?)
How do you want to be remembered? What are you doing to make that happen?
What is the gift you bring to the world? What gift does the world bring you?

Putting big questions to work for you is perhaps best explained by further questions. What question most resonates with you, gives you pause to think? What would happen if you asked yourself that question each morning for the next 90 days?

Or better said by the poet Rilke, “Live the questions now.”
* * *

Example

2010-12-22T12:40:00.002-05:00

One Fortune 500 executive told his people, "You may do anything you see me doing."

People will emulate, consciously or subconsciously, their leaders, bosses, and managers. If you are forward-thinking, innovative, and progressive, then your team or department will move consistently forward.

True leaders are also willing to roll up their shirt sleeves and do whatever is necessary to make a project succeed. Their commitment and dedication in such a situation sets the example for all of their people.

True leaders are excellent role models.

The example of good men is visible philosophy.
English Proverb

Having Vision

2010-12-12T12:30:00.001-05:00

To be able to visualize the completed project or task, the final goal and all of its rewards and consequences, is the ultimate test for true leaders.

In addition to visualizing "the dream," they must also be able to visualize each task that must be completed, and the integration of those tasks to successfully complete the project. They must also be able to effectively communicate this vision to the group.

To true leaders, vision defines the final goal, and action is the path that leads to the vision.

We have always help to the hope, the belief, the conviction that there is a better life, a better world, beyond the horizon.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Blame

2010-12-03T12:26:00.001-05:00

When in a position of leadership, everything that occurs in your responsibility, even the errors.

Rather than spending effort in placing the blame on others, your job is to mitigate the damage, and to learn from the mistakes, take steps necessary to solve the issue, and make sure the problem does not recur in the future.

The buck stops here!
Harry S. Truman

Jealousy

2010-11-29T12:20:00.001-05:00

True leaders focus on their own career and accomplishments. Others, including those in competition with you, will also garner accomplishments and awards.

Rather than wasting energy on jealousy, share their joy of accomplishment. Seek them out as friends and colleagues. Learn from them.

Winners associate with winners!

Of all the passions, jealousy is that which exerts the hardest service and pays the bitterest wages.
Charles Cabet Colton

Excessive Pressure

2010-11-20T12:14:00.000-05:00

Leaders prevent excessive pressure on both themselves and them members of their team. Set realistic goals for yourself and your team. You should be able to see the end in mind the means of achieving it.

If an unrealistic task is given, realize it and break it down to a realistic, seeable, achievable goal. Expectations set the motivation of the group. Excessive pressure on members serves no purpose and often kills initiative and creativity at all levels.

We are more often frightened than hurt; our troubles spring more often from fancy than reality.
Seneca.

Humility of a Leader

2010-11-10T12:07:00.000-05:00

Don't be caught up in the power and prestige of your position. Nothing is beneath a true leader. You must always be willing to help your team and teammates, even in what may seem to be the most mundane tasks.

Remember that you and your fellow co-workers will occasionally make mistakes. You know that, and they know that. If you have an arrogant attitude, you can expect no help from your fellow teammates in preventing or correcting your errors or theirs.

To be vain of one's rank or place, is to show that one is below it.
Stanislas I

Leaders Cannot Afford to Lose Their Temper

2010-11-05T11:59:00.002-04:00

There is little in the world worthy of losing your temper. Yet frustrations in every aspect of our personal and professional life are common and can be difficult to deal with.

As a leader, always try to stay in control. Discuss problems openly with the people involved. Be open in thought and firm in your demands, but remain in control.

Superiors, suppliers, peers, customers, teammates, and subordinates will sometimes (often times) be infuriating, but losing your temper will probably only compound the problem instead of solving it.

When angry, count ten before you speak. If very angry, a hundred.
Thomas Jefferson.

Leaders of Today

2010-10-30T11:50:00.003-04:00

True leaders have an understanding of the present, and a vision for the future. To be successful as a leader in any industry, you must:

Prepare to be a leader.
Understand leadership.
And then be prepared to assume the leadership role in your organization.

Your journey must not end here. In fact, your journey will never end as a true leader.
Leadership is about reaching for the stars, and when you reach one, reach for the next one, It's exciting, it's fun, and it's the essence of life.

The talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do well. and doing well whatever you do. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Leadership Gurus 2011

2010-10-07T15:56:00.002-04:00

The Best Leadership Gurus Voting for 2011:

by Orrin Woodward on Thu 16 Sep 2010 12:59 PM EDT

The voting is now taking place for the Top 30 and Top 25 Leadership Guru list. I will attach the links if you would like to vote. Thanks in advance and keep leading and learning on your journey to success. God Bless, Orrin Woodward

http://leadershipgurus.net/index.html - Vote for Top 30
http://www.topleadershipgurus.com/index.php - Vote for Top 25

From the Leadership Gurus 2011 Poll:

Leadership Gurus is your ultimate compass in directing you to the world's Top 10 and Top 30 leadership gurus, leadership speakers and leadership trainers across the globe 2010. If you are looking for the best presenters in leadership, change management, leadership development, leadership training, change leadership, leading leaders, and MORE, then let Leadership Gurus International be your guide.

Who are the worlds Leadership Gurus?

Leadership Gurus International, combined with public feedback, independently rates leadership trainers and leadership speakers from Asia, the Americas, Australia and Europe to determine if they have attained “guru” status. Only those leadership speakers and trainers who have attained “guru” status are featured on this site. Each of them has also been bestowed the GURU Award of Excellence based on our criteria.

Vote for the Best Leadership Gurus 2011 here.

Read on and vote you will find wisdom from top Leadership Guru's and Leadership Trainers such as John Maxwel l, Ken Blanchard, Orrin Woodward, Arthur F. Carmazzi, and Robin Sharma.

Free-Competition

2010-10-06T11:18:00.003-04:00

A Lesson on Free-Competition from http://www.capitalism.org/faq/competition.htm

Free-competition means freedom from physical force to produce for ones own profit.

What is free-competition?

Free competition is the freedom to produce, and the freedom to trade what one has produced, for ones own self-interest, i.e., in the pursuit of ones own happiness.

What is the foundation of free-competition?

Politically, free-competition is a consequence of the political right to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness applied to the economic sphere of production and trade.

Morally, competition among producers is founded not on service to consumers -- which is a result; but, upon the pursuit of rational self-interest, i.e. the profit motive. Economically, its result is a free-market, i.e. free trade.

Observe that free-market competition presupposes a social system based on individual rights -- and cannot exist without the protection of rights by government, e.g. what good is the right to produce (right to liberty) if one does not have the right to keep what one has created (right to property), the right to advertise what one has produced (right to free speech), the right to trade ones goods one ones own terms (right to property) and the right to benefit from what one has produced (right to the pursuit of happiness)?

Free-competition without individual rights is a contradiction in terms, it is an oxymoron. Of course, if one is a communist, fascist or socialist (all are different forms of a single evil principle: collectivism) and does not believe in individual rights then competition has an entirely different meaning.

What is the difference between competition under capitalism and competition under all other kinds of societies (collectivist societies)?

All social systems have competition, the only difference is that in capitalism, all such competition for economic power results in the creation of wealth, whereas in collectivist societies such competition for political power results in the destruction of wealth.

Under capitalism, competition is an economic process where men do not compete to put down others, but to raise their self up by creating values which are potentially unlimited, and raising their competitors up in the process.

Under all collectivist systems competition is a political process where men compete not to create values, but to lobby or kill for positions of political power which they can use to legally extort the wealth of their fellow men.

Here's yet another great Orrin article explaining these principles in terms we can all relate to:

Competition, Excuses, and Free Trade

by Orrin Woodward on Tue 05 Oct 2010 11:21 AM EDT

Competition ensures that winners won’t buy their own excuses.

Competition, a concept much loved by anyone attending a professional sporting event, seeks to have the best contend against the best for the enjoyment of all. Top level competition reminds me of my youth, when NBA legends Larry Bird and Earvin “Magic” Johnson, both intense competitors and quintessential winners, were first entering the professional ranks. The battles between the Lakers and Celtics became legendary as each team made constant adjustments to improve against the other. The NBA turned into a fan favorite, selling out once empty stadiums, in a large part to the competitive greatness displayed by Bird and Magic. Sadly, competitive greatness, this key ingredient to keeping a country productive, is being lost in the business world as entrepreneurs, fed on a diet of government subsidies and tariffs, become more like bureaucrats than business owners. Can you imagine the outrage if, after a Lakers loss to the Celtics, the Laker team, rather than confront their lack of execution leading to the loss, instead chose to run to the California congress, seeking a tariff restriction against Celtic basketball the next time they entered California? I can see the arguments now in congress, the Laker team provides jobs for Americans, it has been an icon in the NBA for years, we cannot allow Laker basketball to fail; therefore, we must support a tariff restriction against the uncompetitive practices of the Celtics, those egregious winners. Ok, one might be thinking the author is getting carried away as there are no tariffs between states. This is correct, certainly one of the best decisions our Founding Fathers made was to eliminate all tariffs set up to protect the states against competition from other states. The Lakers are forbidden by law to seek protection against the Celtics and must learn to adjust to the competitive pressures applied by the Celtics, if they wish to compete and win. The Founding Fathers, although they understood the importance of each state having to compete on its own merits without tariffs, interestingly allowed tariffs on an international scale between countries, claiming the need to protect new American industries. They agreed with competition within the country, improving the output, quality and price, but wavered in principle when discussing competition amongst countries.

Let’s revisit our NBA analogy with a twist,... FULL ARTICLE HERE.

Orrin Woodward & the Power of Creative Visualization

2010-10-05T11:54:00.006-04:00

Harnessing the power of creative visualization to help you improve every area of your life is not only possible, it's the only way to truly achieve change. It is a power every one of us uses everyday, whether you are aware of it or not. Being aware of and having the knowledge of these laws governing creative visualization, and engaging a conscious and effective use of them, you can fill your life with success and positive change.

Anything we focus upon such as success, health, money, family, promotion, marriage, business, and possessions can be gained through creative visualization. While it may not mean that everything will magically change overnight, mental work is necessary to begin changing the foundation of our thinking and our beliefs. This change of attitude towards life is absolutely necessary to achieve any subsequent manifested change. You need to simply have an open mind, focus & concentration, the ability to visualize, and a lot of enthusiasm and don't forget persistence.

No one understands this better than Orrin. Here's another great post from a guy who not only has a big vision, but casts one even bigger.

Dreams or Dreads

by Orrin Woodward on Mon 04 Oct 2010 10:01 AM EDT

It’s hard to light yourself on fire with your dream when you are busy wetting yourself with your dread.

All achievers, in every field, visualize successful outcomes before making them a reality. From athletes, salespeople, musicians, business owners, and many others, top performers understand the power of vision. The ability of your subconscious mind to lead you towards your dominating vision is little known and rarely tapped into amongst the masses, but his must change. If someone plans on breaking out of the crowd, learning to feed the subconscious mind the vision of the future isn’t a nice add on, but an absolute necessity. Author Vince Poscente, a world class athlete, wrote in his entertaining and informative book, The Ant & the Elephant, on the difference between the conscious and subconscious mind, teaching that the conscious mind in one second of thinking through words stimulates 2,000 neurons, while the sub-conscious mind in a second of imagining through images stimulates 4 billion neurons. That’s 4,000,000,000 neurons, literally 2 million times more neurons stimulated in your subconscious mind than your conscious mind in one second of activity. Poscente called the conscious mind the and and the subconscious mind an elephant. Loving analogies, I have used the ant and elephant concept numerous times to teach people the power in their imagination. The great Albert Einstein said, many years ago, “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” so these concepts are not new, just rarely applied in people’s lives.

CLICK for the rest of this life-changing information.

The Harder Right vs. The Easy Wrong- Orrin Woodward

2010-10-03T11:42:00.004-04:00

Orrin has been a blogging crazy man lately. I'm not sure how he puts out such relevant, thought-provoking, inspirational and poignant articles on such a continuous basis but.... oh wait, yes I do... he's Orrin Woodward. The guy reads and thinks more in a single day than most do in their entire lifetime.

Another great article:

Character - Producers vs Exploiters

by Orrin Woodward on Sat 02 Oct 2010 08:42 AM EDT

Leaders always choose the harder right rather than the easier wrong.

Character demands strength of mind, heart, and will. Choosing to do right, regardless of what others are doing, isn’t easy or natural, but leaders refuse to surrender their character, considering it more valuable than any earthly possession. Many talk glibly of character, boasting loudly of its importance, who, when circumstances press against them, quickly run to the easier wrong than the harder right. Character is less about head knowledge, nearly everyone knows when they are doing wrong, but more a matter of heart knowledge, doing right when it hurts. In life, one can choose to produce results or search for ways to exploit others results. Producers create value by serving people, either directly in the service fields, or indirectly by producing products that people desire. Producers do not look for handouts, only hand ups. Given the right training, they can achieve nearly anything by their efforts and tenacity. Maintaining a productive existence requires character as people will not remain in business with exploiters unless coerced. One of the quickest way to recognize producers, is by the long term relationships built through serving others through win-win principles. Character based people refuse to be exploiters, even though it looks easier, it always ends up hurting the person more than it benefits the pocketbook.

The rest of the story: CLICK IT

The State of Education

2010-09-30T10:58:00.001-04:00

The American Public School system has reached a stage where students are ill prepared to appreciate or even to understand their unique birthright bequeathed to them through the blood and sacrifices of their ancestors. There is also an easily demonstrated basic lack of knowledge concerning the convergence of history, economics, and civics as well as the ability to discern from the rhetoric of others what is truth and what is indoctrination. In other academic areas, America’s students score consistently below their foreign counterparts on international tests and thus are ill-prepared to compete in a global marketplace. American students rank near the bottom relative to students in other industrialized countries recently placing 25th when students from 40 countries were tested. This translates to many of America’s “A” students being average in comparison to those of other countries. For nearly a century, the “Progressives” have dominated American education which over time has led to a reduction in students’ capacity for knowledge and rational thought. The consequences of this incapacitation include most of the social maladies our country presently experiences. The more God and the Framers of our American system are removed from education, the weaker the American education system becomes. Various individual classroom teachers understand the shortcomings, but they are powerless to change the system from within. Foundational and historical beliefs of morality have been assaulted and eroded away, being replaced by moral relativism. The present education system is leading successive generations inexorably to the point where our freedoms are being limited, our standard of living is threatened, and the very life of our Republic is at stake.

This is such a great article from Orrin that I had to republish it here:

Separation of Education & State

by Orrin Woodward on Thu 30 Sep 2010 07:33 AM EDT

Peeling away the layers of rhetoric from reality in our Public School System, one discovers an interesting paradox; even though Americans enthusiastically support the Separation of Church & State, strangely, they do not feel the same vigor for Separation of Education & State. What are the real differences between religion and education, lifting the veil on both reveals underlying presuppositions that are unprovable, making both more a matter of faith rather than science, requiring belief in doctrines that cannot empirically be proven true or false. The administrators (High Priests) of both genres feed the faithful accepted doctrines, brooking no resistance to the approved creeds. Don’t misunderstand me, I am not against organized religion nor organized education, the more of both the better, as far as I am concerned, for man and society. Everything in life boils down to faith when you backtrack it to first principles, dealing with world-views and the like. My question to the State School Board or, if I may be so bold, the Priests of Education, is why, during the founding of America, was it so important to ensure the State never crossed into the religious sphere, protecting the people against a powerful centralized State Church, even going so far as to make it one of the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights? The government wouldn’t consider creating a State Church, requiring mandatory attendance every Sunday, teaching State Doctrines at State Churches in every neighborhood; but we yield to our government the same level of control, requiring mandatory attendance, not on Sundays, but Monday through Fridays, educating all adolescents in State Doctrines at State Schools (Churches). When State centralized education requires mandatory attendance of children at State School schools, teaching doctrines much like churches teach creeds,, reaching into every home, I get a bit concerned. The only options for parents, other than surrendering to tyranny, are to quit the public school system entirely, while still supporting them with their local taxes. This doesn’t sound like freedom to me.

As I see it, religious doctrines and educational doctrines are merely different sides of the same coin. Just as theories abound, teaching various religious creeds, suggesting the proper methods and principles to worship God, so too, theories abound teaching various educational creeds, suggesting the proper methods and principles to teach a child. Yet, somehow, we believe an omniscient State will select just the right creeds for our child, regardless of his or her circumstances, ignoring our child’s family life, religious principles, or career aspirations. Now I am a reasonable person, certainly willing to hear all rational discussions on the subject, but something strikes me as disingenuous, separating a man’s religious beliefs so completely from his educational beliefs. To use just one example, suppose a young man was taught in the home or church, that God made men and women for each other, under the sacrament of marriage. He might have a hard time swallowing any contrary doctrine, offered up in our State Schools. Now before you bash me as a sexist, gender hater, etc, please hear my point, the point is, shouldn’t the same freedoms that apply to religion apply when referring to education? Regardless of the specific doctrines one believes in, a higher doctrine ought to be the freedom to choose, since America is famous for being the “land of freedom.” No one should be forced to endure an indoctrination against his will nor forced to submit his children to the same treatment. If parents choose to send their children to another school, aligning better with their personal beliefs, they ought to have that right, transferring their tax dollars to the school of choice, instead of paying more. I believe in freedom of choice so much, that I would fight for your right to disagree with my beliefs, choosing to send your children to another school; the school of your choice. Freedom ensures that we all get the education for our children that we desire, not what the State desires. Free discussion and free choices makes us all better, that’s what makes America great.

Thomas Jefferson, one of the earliest and strongest proponents of religious freedoms, shared these principles with his fellow Virginia delegates, arguing that it’s unjust to charge Presbyterians, Baptist, Congregationalist, etc, to support the Virginia Anglican State Church. For example, if a Baptist moved to Virginia, he was required to pay a tax to support the Anglican church even though he didn’t attend nor believe the Anglican creeds. Liberty loving Virginians could see the justice in Mr. Jefferson’s views and repealed the mandatory tax supporting the Virginia State Church. The Separation of Church & State became a foundational plank in Virginia, eventually finding its way into the Constitution through the Bill of Rights, inspiring millions to come to America to enjoy religious freedom. An interesting aside is George Washington’s thoughts on the Separation of Church & State, believing that churches built character through faith and creeds, Washington was hesitant to see churches not funded by public taxes; therefore, he proposed to tax all citizens, but give them a choice of which church to support. Mr. Washington proposed a voucher program for religion, giving freedom of choice while ensuring that churches thrived to build character in the people for the benefit of society. No, I’m not proposing launching church vouchers, invoking the name of the great George Washington to bolster my position. I believe keeping government out of local churches, the true meaning of Separation of Church & State, has been a blessing, allowing each church to serve their God and congregations as they please, not requiring, nor asking for, government handouts.

My aside on Washington was merely to point out how important freedom of choice was to our Founding Fathers, a freedom sadly missing from our current Public School System. How many millions of children over the years, having conflicting beliefs with the High Priest of Education, went to private schools by the free choice of the parents, paying a tuition for private school on one hand, while still being taxed by the State School on the other hand. But let’s not forget the recent phenomena, if not outright revolution, called Home Schooling. Over the last thirty years or so, millions of children have been home schooled, a challenging endeavor, where parents choose to educate their children, receiving no pay, giving of their time and money in a labor of love, but still suffering from the tax load of a State School they are no longer employing. A young Thomas Jefferson, when faced with a similar situation in 18th century Virginia, confronted by the injustice of forcing parishioner of other sects to pay for a church they didn’t attend, loved freedom enough to do something about it. Maybe George Washington’s idea, if converted from religion to education has merit. School vouchers, a plan where each parent is given a voucher from the State to spend at the school of their choice, would solve the Separation of Education & State issue. Giving each parent a voucher, allowing each family to choose the school that best fits their needs, brings free enterprise and decentralization to the school system. The school options will increase and conflicts over doctrines will decrease by allowing parents to choose an education that marries with their religious beliefs and student's career choices. Perhaps America, that beacon of light, though flickering a bit of late, will remember its great heritage, standing against injustices, even if it doesn’t directly affect them; because tyranny, when given a chance to seed in society’s soil, sinks it roots deeply, consuming everything in its path.

I purposely kept this discussion at fifty thousand feet, not diving into the details of our State School System, not that there isn’t plenty to say, but only because I didn’t want to take away from my main message. Few will argue that our State Schools are broken, throwing more money at State Schools seems to be the only solution bantered about. I have learned over the years that, if the riverbed is wrong, pouring more water in the river isn’t the answer. Until we start working on the foundation, the riverbed, nothing is going to change. The riverbed change, in my opinion, is Separation of Education & State. Of course, the State System is failing, because the State is involved in an area that is shouldn’t be. Can you name any government program designed to serve the public that hasn't failed miserably? It’s not the teachers, nor the students, but the entire system based upon centralized control that must be rooted out. Thomas Jefferson understood this, which is why he decentralized religion from government, making a riverbed change; we need modern day Jefferson’s to decentralize schooling from government, making another riverbed change. I believe firmly that a free enterprise school system, where parents vote with their vouchers, rewarding excellence while punishing incompetence as all customers do in free enterprise, will build a world class educational system that can compete in today’s “flat world.” The key is for free people to make free choices. As over time, free people making free choices will always thrive over tyrannized people following State bureaucrats. Perhaps a Jefferson will step up, creating a Separation of Education & State as Thomas Jefferson’s created a Separation of Religion & State. God Bless, Orrin Woodward

Citizen Link: Founding Fathers on the Constitution of the United States

2010-09-17T20:42:00.010-04:00

In all my recent reading on the Constitution, I regularly read commentary on current events relative to Constitutional matters. CitizenLink has insightful and educational articles addressing certain issues of today. Be informed! Get involved! It is your country. It's your Constitution. This article in particular I found insightful since these were the men who wrote it. Should we not also have the passion to know, understand and defend it?

http://www.citizenlink.com

Friday Five: Founding Fathers on the Constitution of the United States

Posted By Catherine Snow On September 17, 2010 @ 5:04 pm In Friday 5,Top Story | No Comments

Today, Sept. 17, is the 223rd birthday of the signing of the U.S. Constitution in Philadelphia.
To pay homage to this foundational document, CitizenLink reflects on the words proclaimed by the Founding Fathers –men who pledged not only their fortunes – but their very lives – for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…”
The Constitution is under attack like never before. The liberal, elite establishment positioned throughout various pillars of society –politics, government, media, education and entertainment – want to dismantle this founding document and seem willing to replace it with international laws suite to their goals.
Americans, however, are waking up – as seen by spontaneous growth of the Tea Party movement, the intense thirst in reading about the Founding Fathers and the founding documents. Over three million pocket Constitutions have been handed out by the Heritage Foundation – and that’s just one organization! This explains the results of a new AP poll released today that says that three-fourths of Americans still believe the Constitution is “enduring and not outdated.”
1. What would the Founding Fathers say today about the Constitution?
George Washington of Virginia and first president of the United States:

“The Constitution is the guide which I will never abandon.”

William Paterson of New Jersey and signer of the Constitution:

“What is a Constitution? It is the form of government, delineated by the mighty hand of the people, in which certain first principles of fundamental law are established. The Constitution is certain and fixed; it contains the permanent will of the people, and is the supreme law of the land; it is paramount to the power of the Legislature, and can be revoked or altered only by the authority that made it.”

Alexander Hamilton of New York and author of the Federalist Papers:

“[T]he Constitution ought to be the standard of construction for the laws, and that wherever there is an evident opposition, the laws ought to give place to the Constitution. But this doctrine is not deducible from any circumstance peculiar to the plan of convention, but from the general theory of a limited Constitution.”

John Jay, president of the Continental Congress, appointed by George Washington as the first Supreme Court Justice and co-author of the Federalist Papers, advised:

“Every member of the State ought diligently to read and to study the constitution of his country. . . . By knowing their rights, they will sooner perceive when they are violated and be the better prepared to defend and assert them.”

George Washington:

“(T)he fundamental principle of our Constitution… enjoins (requires) that the will of the majority shall prevail.”

2. What did the Founding Fathers try to accomplish in the Constitution?
James Madison, fourth president of the U.S. and “Father of the Constitution,” wrote to Thomas Jefferson, third president and author of the Declaration of Independence, wrote on Oct. 24, 1787:

“The great objects which presented themselves were:
To unite a proper energy in the Executive and a proper stability in the Legislative departments, with the essential characters of Republican Government.
To draw a line of demarcation which would give the general Government every power requisite for general purposes, and leave to the States every power which might e most beneficially administered by them.
To provide for the different interests of different parts of the Union.
To adjust the clashing pretensions of the large and small States. Each of these objects was pregnant with difficulties.
“The whole of them together formed a task more difficult than can be well conceived by those who were not concerned in the execution of it.”

3. What would the Founding Fathers think about the federal government’s encroachment into rights relegated to the States?
James Madison:

“The people are the only legitimate foundation of power, and it is from that the constitutional character, under which the several branches of government hold their power, is derived.”

Thomas Jefferson:

“The states can best govern our home concerns, and the (federal) government our foreign ones.”

Joseph Story, author of the comprehensive “Commentaries of the Constitution,” which is considered one of the cornerstones of American jurisprudence:

“The plain import of the clause is, that congress shall have all the incidental and instrumental powers, necessary and proper to carry into execution all the express powers. It neither enlarges any power specifically granted; nor is it a grant of any new power to congress. But it is merely a declaration for the removal of all uncertainty, that the means of carrying into execution those, otherwise granted, are included in the grant.”

James Madison:

“As the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial departments of the United States are co-ordinate, and each equally bound to support the Constitution, it follows that each must in the exercise of its functions be guided by the text of the Constitution according to its own interpretation of it.”

Thomas Jefferson:

“Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a single government. Public servants at such a distance and from under the eye of their constituents . . . will invite the public agents to corruption, plunder, and waste. . . . What an augmentation of the field for jobbing, speculating, plundering, office-building, and office-hunting would be produced by an assumption of all the state powers into the hands of the federal government!”

4. What would the Founding Fathers think about this Congress’ use of the “General Welfare Clause” in order to justify everything from bailouts to “health care for all”?
James Madison addressed this very issue in 1792, when some congressman attempted to “bailout” the ailing fishing industry. Madison explained why it was unconstitutional:

“Those who proposed the Constitution knew, and those who ratified the Constitution also knew that this is . . . a limited government tied down to specified powers. . . . It was never supposed or suspected that the old Congress could give away the money of the states to encourage agriculture or for any other purpose they pleased.”

As if a portent to the consequences this country now faces, he warned:

“If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the ‘general welfare,’ and are the sole and supreme judges of the ‘general welfare,’ then they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every state, county, and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the United States; they may assume the provision for the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, everything from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police would be thrown under the power of Congress, for every object I have mentioned would admit of the application of money, and might be called, if Congress pleased, provisions for the ‘general welfare.’”

5. Why did the Founding Fathers make the judicial branch the weakest branch of government?
Thomas Jefferson:

“Our Constitution. . . . has given – according to this opinion – to one of [the three Branches] alone the right to prescribe rules for the government of the others – and to that one, too, which is unelected by and independent of the nation. . . . The Constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the Judiciary which they may twist and shape into any form they please.”

Thomas Jefferson:

“When the Legislative or Executive functionaries act unconstitutionally, they are responsible to the people in their elective capacity. The exemption of the judges from that is quite dangerous enough. I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them [the people] not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”

Jonathan Mason, law student trained by John Adams and an early member of Congress:

“The independence of the judiciary so much desired will – if tolerated – soon become something like supremacy. They will, indeed, form the main pillar of this goodly fabric; they will soon become the only remaining pillar, and they will presently be so strong as to crush and absorb the others into their solid mass.”

Rufus King of Massachusetts, signer of the Constitution, framer of the Bill of Rights:

“The judges must interpret the laws; they ought not to be legislators.”

Luther Martin, framer of the Constitution and attorney general of Maryland:

“A knowledge of mankind and of legislative affairs cannot be presumed to belong in a higher degree to the judges than to the Legislature.”

Thomas Jefferson:

“You seem . . . to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions – a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps. . . . (A)nd their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Watch Heritage Foundation’s, “We the People: Honoring Constitution Day.” ^[1]
Get back to the basics with Heritage’s comprehensive “First Principle” website. ^[2]
Read David Barton’s, “Keys to Good Government: According to the Founding Fathers.” ^[3]
Learn more about historian David Barton and Wallbuilders. ^[4]
Read former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese’s blog, “Constitution Day and the Perilous Future.”^[5]
Read the Alabama Policy Institute’s, “What Will Students Learn on Constitution Day?” ^[6]

Related posts:

Article printed from CitizenLink: http://www.citizenlink.com
URL to article: http://www.citizenlink.com/2010/09/friday-five-founding-fathers-on-the-constitution-of-the-united-states/
URLs in this post:

[1] “We the People: Honoring Constitution Day.”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejH1Xvw12sA

[2] Get back to the basics with Heritage’s comprehensive “First Principle” website.: http://www.heritage.org/Initiatives/First-Principles

[3] “Keys to Good Government: According to the Founding Fathers.”: http://patriotshop.us/product_info.php?cPath=85&products_id=795

[4] Learn more about historian David Barton and Wallbuilders.: http://www.wallbuilders.com

[5] “Constitution Day and the Perilous Future.”: http://blog.heritage.org/2010/09/17/morning-bell-constitution-day-and-the-perilous-future/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell

[6] “What Will Students Learn on Constitution Day?”: http://www.alabamapolicy.org/gary_blog/article.php?id_art=427

[7] Constitution Headlines Celebration in Northern Virginia: http://www.citizenlink.com/2009/09/citizenlink-constitution-headlines-celebration-in-northern-virginia/

[8] Position Statement on Federal Judicial Appointments: http://www.citizenlink.com/2005/06/position-statement-on-federal-judicial-appointments/

[9] Abortion Law in the United States: http://www.citizenlink.com/2010/06/abortion-law-in-the-united-states/

[10] Dr. Dobson Helps Larry King Understand ‘Separation of Church and State’: http://www.citizenlink.com/2006/11/citizenlink-dr-dobson-helps-larry-king-understand-separation-of-church-and-state/

Click here to print.

It's Only Freedom at Stake

2010-09-10T13:06:00.000-04:00

In light of the turmoil and lack of direction our country, our economy, our government, our culture, and pretty much everything else in America is experiencing, I have been doing a considerable amount of self study. What I have found is this: I absolutely love all of the incredible reading and study I have been doing on the Constitution of the United States, the history behind it, and the incredible freedoms we enjoy as Americans because of it. I am also utterly appalled at the degradation of our Constitution's authority and purity and how we have all allowed this decay to not only endure but 'progressively' hasten. The fragile liberties we have enjoyed are under massive attack today and are not being protected. Many are focused on simply the economic issues while the spiritual and political freedoms are being undermined. Each of these freedoms are not autonomous of each other but interdependent upon one another. We will never save one without preserving the others. Without 'The People' defending those liberties, they will surely perish. We must be that People. There is no one else. This will require leadership, our own personal leadership. That leadership begins with knowing & understanding what is at risk and why. Read and educate yourself on the incredible providential history of these United States. Discover why we have enjoyed the freedoms we have and how far we have come from their creation. You will be sucked into the great mission that was America and the passion behind those first heroes who were citizens of an idea that was yet to be formed. America needs such heroes again. America needs YOU!!

Here is a great introduction of the foundational freedoms at stake from my friend and leader, Orrin Woodward.

Murray Rothbard - The Discipline of Liberty

by Orrin Woodward on Wed 08 Sep 2010 12:48 PM EDT

I am sitting in my hotel suite, overlooking the blue ocean as the sunrises, pondering the meaning of liberty. Yesterday, Laurie and I, plus three of our children (Jeremy lectured me on why he needed to stay home to fulfill his soccer commitments), enjoyed the freedom to hop on an airplane and travel to Hawaii. This is our 10th time to Hawaii in 11 years. We have been blessed to enjoy the liberty to build our own business, to enjoy the fruits of our labors and to share our experiences and knowledge with others to help others prosper. Underlying all of these blessing is our Creator's blessings and a system of free enterprise that rewards people based upon their individual contributions. Anyone that isn’t hiding in a hole is well aware that our liberties are waning as Big Government attempts to solve issues that it cannot solve and wasn’t created to solve. The more government spends on items that it cannot solve, the less freedom all citizens have.

I am sometimes criticized for mixing faith, politics, and leadership together, but without combined columns of spiritual freedom, economic freedom, and political freedom, our freedom edifice will fall. If any leader allows one of these planks to be attacked and does nothing, the whole edifice of liberty will fall. The blood will be on our hands for not only, not improving, but allowing the rot of our liberty based systems. Are you a leader? Then you have a responsibility to learn why spiritual, economic and political freedoms rise and fall together, because you have enjoyed the fruits of the labor of the many who have led before us. Freedom isn’t free and must be defended with a vigilance against all would be tyrants, even if the tyrant is an out of control democracy. We have met the enemy and the enemy is us. Here is a portion of an introduction by Murray Rothbard from his book Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, who is fast becoming one of my favorite economists. Rothbard teaches the importance of economists branching out into the fields of politics, leadership, philosophy etc, as all areas tie together to create our endangered liberties. Read the post and ask yourself what role you can play to defend liberty. God Bess, Orrin Woodward

Probably the most common question that has been hurled at me—in some exasperation—over the years is: "Why don't you stick to economics?" For different reasons, this question has been thrown at me by fellow economists and by political thinkers and activists of many different persuasions: Conservatives, Liberals, and Libertarians who have disagreed with me over political doctrine and are annoyed that an economist should venture "outside of his discipline."

Among economists, such a question is a sad reflection of the hyper-specialization among intellectuals of the present age. I think it manifestly true that very few of even the most dedicated economic technicians began their interest in economics because they were fascinated by cost curves, indifference classes, and the rest of the paraphernalia of modern economic theory. Almost to a man, they became interested in economics because they were interested in social and political problems and because they realized that the really hard political problems cannot be solved without an understanding of economics. After all, if they were really interested mainly in equations and tangencies on graphs, they would have become professional mathematicians and not have devoted their energies to an economic theory that is, at best, a third-rate application of mathematics. Unfortunately, what usually happens to these people is that as they learn the often imposing structure and apparatus of economic theory, they become so fascinated by the minutiae of technique that they lose sight of the political and social problems that sparked their interest in the first place. This fascination is also reinforced by the economic structure of the economics profession (and all other academic professions) itself: namely, that prestige, rewards, and brownie points are garnered not by pondering the larger problems but by sticking to one's narrow last and becoming a leading expert on a picayune technical problem.

Among some economists, this syndrome has been carried so far that they scorn any attention to politico-economic problems as a demeaning and unclean impurity, even when such attention is given by economists who have made their mark in the world of specialized technique. And even among those economists who do deal with political problems, any consideration devoted to such larger extra-economic matters as property rights, the nature of government, or the importance of justice is scorned as hopelessly "metaphysical" and beyond the pale.

It is no accident, however, that the economists of this century of the broadest vision and the keenest insight, men such as Ludwig von Mises, Frank H. Knight, and FA. Hayek, came early to the conclusion that mastery of pure economic theory was not enough, and that it was vital to explore related and fundamental problems of philosophy, political theory, and history. In particular, they realized that it was possible and crucially important to construct a broader systematic theory encompassing human action as a whole, in which economics could take its place as a consistent but subsidiary part.

In my own particular case, the major focus of my interest and my writings over the last three decades has been a part of this broader approach—libertarianism—the discipline of liberty. For I have come to believe that libertarianism is indeed a discipline, a "science," if you will, of its own, even though it has been only barely developed over the generations. Libertarianism is a new and emerging discipline which touches closely on many other areas of the study of human action: economics, philosophy, political theory, history, even—and not least—biology. For all of these provide in varying ways the groundwork, the elaboration, and the application of libertarianism. Some day, perhaps, liberty and "libertarian studies" will be recognized as an independent, though related, part of the academic curriculum.

Why Is America Bankrupt? A Real Eye Opener...

2010-09-04T19:55:00.001-04:00

Here is a great article that can be found at Barnett Financial's recent newsletter.

Why Is America Bankrupt?
A Real Eye Opener...

There are programs that benefit non-citizens and we often don't think of them. Well putting them all together forms a bigger picture. If you think it was the War in Iraq that has been costing so much, take a look at this...

14 Reasons Why America Is Bankrupt:

1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year by state governments.

2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens.

3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens.

4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English!

5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies.

6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens. 7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.

8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare & social services by the American taxpayers.

9. $200 Billion dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens.

10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that's two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US.

11. During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, crossed into the US from the Southern border.

12. The National policy Institute, estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period.

13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances to their countries of origin.

14. 'The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One million sex crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants in the United States

The total cost is a whopping $ 338.3 billion dollars a year and if you’re like me having trouble understanding this amount of money; it is $338,300,000,000 which could be enough to stimulate the economy for the actual citizens of this country.

Are we THAT stupid? YES, for letting those in the U.S. Congress get away with letting this happen year after year!!

If this raises the hair on the back of your neck, I hope you forward it to every legal resident in the United States AND PLEASE REMEMBER IT AT THE BALLOT BOX !!!

Verify at: http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=iic_immigrationissuecenters7fd8
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Michigan Conservatism?

2010-07-28T00:00:00.006-04:00

July 27, 2010

Primary Target

By Matthew May

"In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress."
- John Adams

In pundit parlance, Michigan's 6^th Congressional District is most assuredly "safe Republican." Republican Fred Upton has represented that district since 1987. Yet for quite some time, the seat has not been "safe conservative."
Michigan's 6^th district is a microcosm of the general arrogance and complacency of the Republican establishment against the constitutional conservatism of the Tea Party movement. If Republicans and conservatives lazily continue to return so-called moderates like Upton to Washington, the slide toward European socialism is perhaps slowed but never halted.

Long ago, Mr. Upton was himself a primary challenger. In 1986, he ran against incumbent Rep. Mark Siljander, who refused to meet Upton in debate before the primary. At the time, Upton remarked that should he one day be in Siljander's position, he would debate all comers, saying "Whoever my challenger is ... I'll debate him. I hope to be proud of my record."

Apparently, over twenty years in Congress exhausts the statute of limitations on such matters. While participating in a solitary debate recorded for later local radio broadcast, Upton has this year dodged several challenges to live debates with his primary challenger, former state representative Jack Hoogendyk. His refusal of a real-time public debate brings to mind the haughty reaction from not a few members of Congress last August when confronted by the great unwashed. Upton knows that even a cursory examination of his record will reveal that he is the sort of Republican only a Democrat could love, the sort of Republican causing almost as much damage as avowed leftists.

The Club for Growth annually ranks voting records of the various state congressional delegations, assigning weighted value to votes on taxes, budgets, earmarks, etc., to judge support for economic freedom, 100 percent being the highest score. In 2009, the average score for Republicans in Congress was nearly 83 percent; Upton's score was a dismal 64 percent, and in 2008 a horrible 39 percent.

Upton is obviously not a dyed-in-the-wool leftist; he pledged to vote against cap-and-trade, as well as to repeal national health care. But he voted for TARP and Cash for Clunkers. The guy is all over the map. When he surmises easy reelection efforts, he slides toward the left, passing out earmarks like candy. When challenged, he is suddenly conservative.

By contrast, Hoogendyk is always conservative, as evidenced by his voting record as a three-term member of the Michigan House of Representatives. In 2007, the legislature as a whole approved $1.4 billion in state tax increases and budgets configured to spend the extra revenue. All told, 155 members of the Michigan legislature voted for at least $1 billion more that the previous year's expenditures. Hoogendyk voted for only $7.5 million more. In 2003, Hoogendyk voted against a "bad driver fee" that eventually passed. He knew right away it was a government scheme to create a windfall, not a public safety initiative. He knew this because he appreciates the limitations our founders placed on government and voted accordingly.

Hoogendyk is a first-generation American -- born in the United States by the grace of God and the wisdom of his parents, who fled postwar Holland in the wake of the undeniable creep toward a socialism that saps individual initiative and the spirit of human freedom. They had a place to which to escape. But there is nowhere else to go -- this is, as Ronald Reagan said, the last stand on Earth. Hoogendyk and many other Republican primary challengers not only realize that, but they have demonstrated their commitment to first principles in state legislatures, city councils, and private enterprise. So must voters.

Conservatives fed up with squeamish Republicans in Congress have this year several opportunities to back true conservatives who understand that we live in a democratic republic, not a direct democracy wherein every single need of the people must be promptly addressed by the federal government, where "earmark" is another word for "bribe." The race in the Republican primary in Michigan's 6^th district is, in stark relief, the difference between members of Congress voting as if all blessings flow from Capitol Hill and conservatives who know this madness must cease if we are to keep our republic.

Jack Hoogendyk has an established record of standing on conservative legislating and should be supported in his bid to unseat Fred Upton, a symbol of comfortably entrenched power. Hoogendyk's guiding principle may seen quaint, but he believes that no matter the issue, the primary question each member of Congress must ask himself during any debate in committee or on the floor is "What is the proper role of the federal government as outlined in the Constitution of the United States?"

Incumbents too long in their seats -- salivating over earmarks, voting based on potential challengers they can crush -- hold most of the cards when facing a primary challenge. But if real change is to come to Congress, conservatives must and can prevail at the ballot box. As it is in Michigan's 6^th district, so it is around the country: "Safe Republican" is meaningless when the Republican is nothing more than a diluted Democrat.

Matthew May welcomes comments at matthewtmay@yahoo.com.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/07/primary_target.html

The Mount Vernon Statement

2010-07-22T18:25:00.003-04:00

Very interesting read:

The Mount Vernon Statement

Constitutional Conservatism:
A Statement for the 21st Century

We recommit ourselves to the ideas of the American Founding.Through the Constitution, the Founders created an enduring framework of limited government based on the rule of law. They sought to secure national independence, provide for economic opportunity, establish true religious liberty and maintain a flourishing society of republican self-government.

These principles define us as a country and inspire us as a people. They are responsible for a prosperous, just nation unlike any other in the world. They are our highest achievements, serving not only as powerful beacons to all who strive for freedom and seek self-government, but as warnings to tyrants and despots everywhere.

Each one of these founding ideas is presently under sustained attack. In recent decades, America’s principles have been undermined and redefined in our culture, our universities and our politics. The selfevident truths of 1776 have been supplanted by the notion that no such truths exist. The federal government today ignores the limits of the Constitution, which is increasingly dismissed as obsolete and irrelevant.

Some insist that America must change, cast off the old and put on the new. But where would this lead — forward or backward, up or down? Isn’t this idea of change an empty promise or even a dangerous deception?

The change we urgently need, a change consistent with the American ideal, is not movement away from but toward our founding principles. At this important time, we need a restatement of Constitutional conservatism grounded in the priceless principle of ordered liberty articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

The conservatism of the Declaration asserts self-evident truths based on the laws of nature and nature’s God. It defends life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It traces authority to the consent of the governed. It recognizes man’s self-interest but also his capacity for virtue.

The conservatism of the Constitution limits government’s powers but ensures that government performs its proper job effectively. It refines popular will through the filter of representation. It provides checks and balances through the several branches of government and a federal republic.
A Constitutional conservatism unites all conservatives through the natural fusion provided by American principles. It reminds economic conservatives that morality is essential to limited government, social conservatives that unlimited government is a threat to moral self-government, and national security conservatives that energetic but responsible government is the key to America’s safety and leadership role in the world.

A Constitutional conservatism based on first principles provides the framework for a consistent and meaningful policy agenda.

It applies the principle of limited government based on the rule of law to every proposal.
It honors the central place of individual liberty in American politics and life.
It encourages free enterprise, the individual entrepreneur, and economic reforms grounded in market solutions.
It supports America’s national interest in advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world and prudently considers what we can and should do to that end.
It informs conservatism’s firm defense of family, neighborhood, community, and faith.

If we are to succeed in the critical political and policy battles ahead, we must be certain of our purpose.
We must begin by retaking and resolutely defending the high ground of America’s founding principles.

February 17, 2010

http://westillholdthesetruths.org/Mount-Vernon.aspx

We Still Hold These Truths

2010-07-16T11:47:00.000-04:00

Rediscovering Our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future

In the midst of frenzied efforts to remake our nation—of endless government initiatives involved in virtually every aspect of our daily lives—Americans are increasingly concerned: How did we get so far off track? And how can we get America back on course?

Matthew Spalding answers these questions by looking to the timeless principles and practical wisdom that have been the source of America's monumental success. Spalding, an expert in American political history at The Heritage Foundation, the esteemed research and educational institution, calls for a great renewal of these unchanging principles—and a new appreciation of their preeminent status in our nation's life.

In We Still Hold These Truths Spalding explains and brings to life ten core principles that define us as a nation and inspire us as a people—liberty and equality, natural rights and the consent of the governed, private property and religious freedom, the rule of law and constitutionalism, all culminating in self-government at home and independence in the world. His enlightening and engaging tour through America's founding not only recalls the deep roots of our "first principles" in Western civilization but also reveals their enduring lessons for today.

http://westillholdthesetruths.org/

America- First Principles

2010-07-04T23:13:00.004-04:00

The Heritage Foundation- Fighting for America's founding principles.

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

The future of liberty depends on reclaiming America's first principles. "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization," as Thomas Jefferson warned, "it expects what never was and never will be." Widespread ignorance of American history is but the most recognized symptom of the troubling decline in popular knowledge of fundamental principles. We face an education system that upholds mediocrity in the name of relativism; an ever-expanding and centralized government, unmoored from constitutional limits; judges openly making laws and shaping society based on pop-philosophy rather than serious jurisprudence; and growing confusion over America's legitimate role in the world, made all the more apparent by the fundamental threat posed by radical Islamists. At the root of all these problems is a pervasive doubt about the core principles that define America and ought to inform our politics and policy.

As the leading public policy institution focused on American liberty, The Heritage Foundation must lead the call to awaken our country and get it back on course. We must recall the nation to its first principles, reinvigorate American constitutionalism, and revive the sturdy virtues required for self-government. We must restore the principles of America's Founders to their proper role in the public and political discourse, influencing public policy and reforming government to reflect constitutional limits. We must rebuild and unify a robust conservatism around, and in defense of, these core principles, and identify and develop current and future policymakers, opinion-makers, and leaders who understand, articulate, and will promote these principles. In short, our vision, building on the great successes of the modern conservative movement, must now be to save America by reclaiming its truths and its promises and conserving its liberating principles for ourselves and our posterity.

http://www.heritage.org/Initiatives/First-Principles

Self-Discipline: A Difference Maker

2010-05-24T11:13:00.003-04:00

Coming out of an incredible Team Major Leadership Convention in Louisville, KY, many of us are very conscious of turning all the encouragement and vision we have been given into progress and results. Discipline is singularly the most important attribute needed to achieve any type of excellence: personal, organizational, or other. It is the ability to control one's impulses, emotions, desires and behavior. It is being able to turn down immediate pleasure and instant gratification in favor of gaining the long-term satisfaction and fulfillment from achieving higher and more meaningful goals.
Discipline means learning how to focus your mind and energies on your goals and persevere until they are accomplished. It means cultivating a mindset whereby you are ruled by your deliberate choices rather than by your emotions, bad habits or sway of others.
Self-discipline allows you to reach your goals in a reasonable time frame and to live a more orderly and satisfying life.

I remember hearing Orrin Woodward say a long time ago that every single one of us will be disciplined. Either we will discipline ourselves from within and enjoy the rewards of doing so, or we will be disciplined by someone else. Self-discipline makes the difference: Achievers get it, keep it, and employ it every day of their life. Others don't. Here's a great article on Discipline that I just read this morning. Great timing indeed!

Discipline

Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.

We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons.

All disciplines affect each other. Mistakenly the man says, “This is the only area where I let down.” Not true. Every letdown affects the rest. Not to think so is naive.

Discipline is the foundation upon which all success is built. Lack of discipline inevitably leads to failure.

Discipline has within it the potential for creating future miracles.

The best time to set up a new discipline is when the idea is strong.

One discipline always leads to another discipline.

Affirmation without discipline is the beginning of delusion.

You don’t have to change that much for it to make a great deal of difference. A few simple disciplines can have a major impact on how your life works out in the next 90 days, let alone in the next 12 months or the next 3 years.

The least lack of discipline starts to erode our self-esteem.

“Vitamins for the Mind” is a weekly sampling of original quotes on a specific topic taken from The Treasury of Quotes by Jim Rohn. The burgundy hardbound book with gold-foil lettering is a collection of more than 365 quotes on 60 topics gathered from Jim's personal journals, seminars and books and spanning more than 40 years. Click here to order The Treasury of Quotes.

The Wealth Found in Reading Good Books

2010-05-17T11:18:00.004-04:00

I read this article this morning from the Jim Rohn site and found it to be yet another independent endorsement of just how important a system of personal development like the Team System really is. I know Orrin Woodward has always put such a premium value on reading with the specific intent of learning. Orrin has always taught to read in search of finding a few practical nuggets and to put them into practice immediately. It's the best way to take ownership of those traits and get the most from the lessons and experience the author has to offer you. after reading the short article below, I would suggest reading the Learning For Life article written by Orrin some time ago that offers a great sampling of certain lessons that good books offer each of us. I snapped a quick photo of the current reading books on my desk right now. I happened to pick up 5 autographed leadership books at a local bookstore. Now, it's time to get mining in search of the gold that lies within them in order to tap into the gold of the potential that lies with ourselves. Happy reading! Happy mining!

Knowledge Resources: Books -by Denis Waitley

Why do fewer than 10 percent of the public buy and read nonfiction books? One reason is that many would rather get home than get ahead. They are motivated to get by and get pulled along by the company, the economy or the government.

Another reason is that many individuals believe that information found in books, computer programs and training sessions has no value in the business world. How self-deluding!

As the new tools of productivity become the Internet, the DVD,direct digital download of text, audio and video, and the combination of the interactive computer with telecommunications, the people who know how to control the new technologies will acquire power, while those who thought that education ends with the diploma are destined for low-paying, low-satisfaction jobs. In almost the blink of an eye, our society has passed from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Era.

Increase your reading by 100 percent. Decrease your television watching, and that of any children in your family, by 50 percent. Surf the Internet and subscribe to book summaries, or download free chapters from different sources. By reading book summaries, you can gain the essence of all the top business books in a very brief period of time.

Action Idea: Read at least one book each month, and listen to at least one additional audio book during your commute or downtime. One of the best sources for business audio books online is MP3audiobooks.com.

All kinds of reading and listening to fiction and nonfiction will increase your vocabulary and writing and presentation skills. Incredibly, a mere 3,500 words separate the average person from those with superior vocabularies.

Keep a dictionary beside you when you read and look up every word you don’t fully understand. Doing that on the spot helps make those words part of your vocabulary forever. And don’t depend on your computer’s spell checker for your spelling. Not all e-mail service includes spell check. Also, you maybe called upon to write longhand notes, memos, or information on whiteboards or black boards at meetings. You not only want to use the right words, you also will want to spell them correctly.

Start your own library of success books—or add to it—right now! Get 12 top-selling personal-development books, including Denis Waitley’s Safari to the Soul, in one special package—at extraordinary savings and with a special audio book bonus! Click here now for details or to order.

Orrin Woodward- Top 100 Blog Posts That Will Make You a Better Leader

2010-05-13T14:02:00.000-04:00

The Online Degree website recently ranked one of Orrin Woodward's articles, Define, Learn, Do - 3 Keys to Success, at number 15 of the Top 100 Blog Posts That Will Make You a Better Leader.

In an older article I just recently read, a survey was conducted by Executive Development Associates to study the trends in executive development with 100 chief learning officers and heads of leadership-development departments from top companies around the world. The survey asked these leaders who were responsible for the executive development of their respective companies ad organizations what learning methods they would use the most to develop their talent. Specifically, the survey wanted to know how will their leaders learn? And to determine the most effective ways for leaders to learn.

The survey discovered that 3 learning methods widely regarded as especially effective dominated the methods that would be heavily utilized.

Senior Executives as Faculty, (or leader-led learning)
Action Learning, and
Executive coaches

When the EDA followed up with those responsible for the executive development, here's what they found in utilizing these top methods of training and development:

Again, 100 companies responded when we asked those responsible for learning and leadership development to tell us if these three powerful learning methods had increased in importance, stayed the same, or decreased in importance. Here's what we learned:

Leader-Led (using our own executives to teach)
43% - Increased
52% - Stayed the same
5% - Decreased
Action Learning
41% - Increased
55% - Stayed the same
4% - Decreased
Executive Coaching
51% - Increased
38% - Stayed the same
9% - Decreased

In looking at each of the 3 methods, here is what the article reported:

The use of senior executives as faculty (leader-led learning) is the most popular method for developing leaders--the first time in the 21-year history of our Trends Survey that this method has topped the list. Three-quarters of the companies say they will be using their top executives to actually teach in their programs, not just show up for the kick-off or closing ceremonies.

From as far back as I have been involved with Orrin Woodward and the Team, this has been probably the primary method for everyone participating with Team to develop their own leadership. From the Men's and Ladies' Leadership events, the monthly Seminars and Ticket-Holder Meetings, certainly the Major Leadership Conventions and even at the local Open Meeting level, the Team has always employed "Leader-Led" learning at every level. Orrin calls it a meritocracy where those with the greatest degree of results, would, of course, be the most qualified to teach.

Closely following this method is Action Learning (working in teams on current problems or opportunities; both to address real business challenges and to develop the participants simultaneously).

Again here, Team has continuously employed what the EDA survey finds to be one of the top methods employed to train & develop leaders. "Action Learning" is simply a matter of course on the Team and with the Mona Vie Team. There is no better classroom or lab than the real world and building a real business with real people. All of which demands your ongoing leadership development. Since the Mona Vie Team business builds gradually, it is the perfect setting in which to develop the interpersonal relationship and leadership skills necessary to take your team or organization to its next level. The speed of the team is the speed of the leader (or leaders) leading it. The Team has always known and practiced the principal that personal leadership development is necessary for ongoing business growth.

The other significant finding is the high ranking of executive coaching--the first time this sometimes controversial learning method has cracked the top five. It appears that after recent years of both hype and sniping on the benefits of executive coaching, it has gained favor, even though some believe its popularity has peaked. Nevertheless, with executives increasingly under the gun to move quickly and make complex decisions, it makes sense that companies would want a coach to walk managers through challenging situations with a potentially big payoff from the performance improvement that can be gained

This last finding is basic common sense and shows just how 'uncommon' that sense can be. It almost sounds as if this is a surprise that people who are being coached by executives further along in the process would become more proficient themselves. This is the whole idea of being 'mentored'. Trying to 'go it alone' or 'figure it out myself' is certainly one way to do things and acquire the experience and knowledge to grow and succeed. But wouldn't it make a lot more sense to learn from someone who has already encountered that obstacle, resolved that issue, been down that path, and any other way to say it. Successful leaders leave a footprint and create a path for those to follow. Many times leaders find the pitfall themselves and can point out the dangers the next leaders will face or at least prepare them for what will most certainly be encountered in their own journey. Coaching and mentorship opportunities are invaluable to anyone seeking to expand their horizons whether it be in a personal setting or a professional endeavor.

I am thankful to have been exposed to a System that has always focused on developing the individual first, equipping and encouraging them to become whoever & whatever they can knowing that the rest that is required for success is almost academic. It's simply a matter of putting it all into practice.

It can start here in Louisville, KY.

A Tribute to Ernie

2010-05-05T22:10:00.000-04:00

Below are a couple of wonderful articles worth reading. It is humbling to contemplate the impact this one man had upon multiple generations.

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?
Robert Browning

I know we're all going at some time, and I'm ready for whatever God's got. I have a great feeling of peace about it. Serenity. What a great thing Heaven's gonna be.
Ernie Harwell from an interview in Sept. 2009. Surrendered his life to Jesus Christ from an invitation of Dr. Billy Graham himself at an Easter service held in Bartow, Florida 1961.

Rest your soul in Heaven Mr. Harwell.

May 05, 2010

The Sound of Silence in Tigertown

American Thinker Blog | Matthew May
Ernie Harwell died last night. He was 92.

Ernie Harwell: Gone now but never forgotten
Mitch Albom | Detroit Free Press | May 5, 2010

Self-Education & Learning

2010-05-03T10:42:00.001-04:00

Education & Learning

Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.

We must learn to apply all that we know so that we can attract all that we want.

Learning is the beginning of wealth. Learning is the beginning of health. Learning is the beginning of spirituality. Searching and learning is where the miracle process all begins.

If someone is going down the wrong road, he doesn't need motivation to speed him up. What he needs is education to turn him around.

Don't see the mind for more than it is, but don't misread it for all that it can be.

Sharpen your interest in two major subjects: life and people. You will only gather information from a source if you are interested in it.

Education must precede motivation.

While you are in school, make sure you get the information. What you think about it, that's up to you. What you are going to do with it that will soon be up to you. But while you are there, make sure you get it. In fact, my advice is: Don't leave school without it!

Never begrudge the money you spend on your own education.

If you step up the self-education curve, you will come up with more answers than you can use.

Quotes by Jim Rohn, America's Foremost Business Philosopher, reprinted with permission from Jim Rohn International (c) 2010. As a world-renowned author and success expert, Jim Rohn touched millions of lives during his 46-year career as a motivational speaker and messenger of positive life change. For more information on Jim and his popular personal achievement resources or to subscribe to the weekly Jim Rohn Newsletter, visit www.JimRohn.com.

Jim Rohn understood the importance of tapping into learning resources for our self-education. The Team exists to serve that very purpose- to produce, provide and deliver the best personal and organizational leadership development resources to help build you as an individual and you as a community builder. Whether you are looking for the industry specific Mona Vie resources, or an independent line of LLR Leadership materials, Team has them for you and your organization.

Not too long ago Orrin Woodward wrote an article regarding the importance of self-education and how crucial it is today to read and educate our minds to have an impact in our culture and preserve the fragile freedoms guaranteed by our US Consitution.

Fading Fast- America's Individual Economic Freedom

2010-04-29T11:51:00.009-04:00

I recently read a short article with embedded video. The complete post can be read at Liberty Scout.

President Obama: “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money”
28 April 2010 at 4:55 pm by Jasper Drake 3 Comments

While campaigning for the Democrat’s “fat cat”-approved financial reform plan, President Obama expressed that, “at a certain point you’ve made enough money.” Really? At what point does a man who made $5.5 million last year think someone has made enough money? Furthermore, who’s responsibility is it to tell anyone they have made enough money? The government? Oh wait, that would be socialism.

Remember! If you “spread the wealth around” it’s good for everyone!

When I saw this, it reminded me of an article I had read on Orrin Woodward's Leadership Blog. I had to search for it but I did find it. Orrin's article began with this important observation:

No economic system has been proven more wrong than Karl Marx and his communist revolution. With this being said, no system that has failed so miserably has so many of its ideas still in practice. It is like a person who realizes that drinking a whole cup of poison will kill him, but determines that half a cup a poison will help him. The communist spent millions of dollars and years of propaganda to inject their poison into the thinking of Americans. It is now a documented fact that the communist worked to control the media and change the American values to communist positions. I would like to take you back to the recognized father of modern communism, Karl Marx. I believe economic understanding is one of the keys for the future of America. With so much misinformation out there, I run the risk of being labeled by many sincere people who do not fully understand what is at stake.

America was founded on strong free enterprise and rule of law principles. How few voters understand this and freely buy into communist positions ought to concern of all us. The whole goal of this blog is to generate discussion and a better understanding of what the media war is about. I am not offended in the least if you disagree with our discussion. All I ask is we think together in an effort to learn truth. Here is an article on the 10 Planks of the Communist Manifesto. Do you recognize some of these originally radical ideas as now mainstream American thought? The ideologies of free enterprise and communism are polar opposites on their view of man, God, and government. Please read carefully and think about the 10 Planks. Does it concern anyone else that America would adopt so many principles from a communist system that is defunct, an abject failure, and Godless from an atheist economist Karl Marx? Why have so many of us been taught these principles as the American way of life? Some will say I am paranoid, but are we paranoid if they really are after us? Here is the linked article with the 10 Planks of the Communist Manifesto.

It really is frightening how 'uneducated' we Americans are regarding the freedoms and liberties we enjoy in this unique country and the current attacks threatening to undermine the very freedoms we profess to cherish. I encourage you to visit and read the entire article. There are many enlightening articles with important principles we all should know on Orrin Woodward Leadership Team.

You can also follow his leadership quips at http://twitter.com/Orrin_Woodward.

Understanding our own American history and how our country achieved the liberties of a free society is the only way to preserve the freedoms we enjoy. Every significant issue we face today can ultimately be traced back to the of erosion of the United States Constitution.

Success Begins with the Knock of Opportunity

2010-03-29T20:04:00.000-04:00

In a home too cramped for our growing family, in a relationship where neither of us understood the other, in a time of increasing responsibilities and decreasing hope, in a desperate move to keep my baseball cards, Laurie and I started our Networking business. Can there be a more bizarre beginning to a destiny changing day? Your story is different in the details, but alike in the life-changing opportunity presented to you. Networking provides people the opportunity to take control of their futures and no longer swim with the current of the times. There are only 3 steps to master to accomplish nearly any goal or dream that you can imagine through the power of the of Networking:

1. Define

2. Learn

3. Do

Orrin recently posted the foregoing in a new article on his Leadership Blog. The description of the moment opportunity presented itself to us is unique for each and yet the same for all. It probably happened when we least expected it but most needed it (admittedly so or not). No matter what the circumstances, the only thing that really matters is what we did with that moment of destiny. Did we simply miss the call, letting it pass as some inconsequential meaningless tick of a clock like so many others before; or did we hear the knock and even turn to see what may be there but refuse to answer, ignoring the call of a chance at better in our lives, a chance to perhaps change our circumstances; or maybe we opened the door, peered across the horizon, stepping out to test the waters only to turn back to our perceived (dis)comfort and (in)security; or maybe, just maybe, we jumped... not really knowing or understanding much, more faith than anything- Faith in the belief that there had to be something, just enough faith, in the possibility of something more out there to move us out of our comfort zone and attempt it, to explore the possibilities of what might be. It happens when the 'what if I don't try and succeed' in the back of our minds becomes just a little stronger than the 'what if I do and fail' that kept us from trying before. It's a liberating moment when we catch a glimpse of what belief in ourselves can do.

This is the feeling, the belief, the confidence, that the Team System has been providing people for years. It's the 'just enough' to attempt what we would absolutely attempt if we knew we could not fail. For a complete rendition of the rest of the story that Orrin begins in the very 1st sentence above, it is all told in the first-person by the players themselves right here: Baseball Cards and the US Ski Team. You can also pick it up as one part of some of the greatest personal success stories of all time in the Additional Information Pack.

Orrin's entire article above can also be read here: http://orrinwoodward.blogharbor.com/

Commit to Your Dreams

2010-03-14T16:54:00.002-04:00

Saturday was the Team's monthly seminar in Ypsilanti, MI. Jim and Dolores Martin, the keynote speakers, really brought their game to a new level delivering a motivating message through their conviction and passion and all of us in attendance were blessed with an exciting picture of the opportunity the Mona Vie Team provides. It is an exciting time to be a distributor with Mona Vie and tied into such a powerful support system with Team. I had several people ask me about my notes used for my talk given during the early Go Power Player meeting. So, I thought I'd publish them here for anyone to review. It is a privilege and honor to step onto a Team stage and discuss principles of success with such an elite group of leaders. Orrin Woodward has certainly put together a group of people focused on continuous personal development- the only real competitive advantage in business today. I hope never to take it for granted. Below is the outline used for that talk.

Commit to Your Dreams

Dreams produce hunger. Hunger produces focus. Focus demonstrates commitment.

Has anyone ever walked the long underground tunnel that connects the A and B gates at Detroit Metro Airport?

Big escalators lead down to a very long and dark tunnel that actually goes under the taxi & runways of the airport. In it are these long moving walkways- 2 on each side going each way. These moving walkways are pretty narrow especially when you’re dragging all your luggage behind you. And so if you’re anything like me, who does not stand still and let the walkway move you forward but insist on walking as fast as possible down these automated cattle corals, you really have to pay attention to what you’re doing. Typically, there are also other people with their luggage whom you are trying to pass or push. And, as if it were created to intentionally cause incidents of injury, the airport has designed visual distractions to challenge you as you maneuver along these heavy machinery walkways. Ya know, the ones with metal teeth at the ends? As you’re cruising down the walkway, all of a sudden the entire area changes color. It goes from a cool relaxing blue hue you hardly even noticed as you entered the walkway to a violent red causing you to look around to see what the heck just happened and just as you take your focus off what you’re doing, where you’re going, it changes again to green. Before you even know what happens, you’re already wobbly luggage wheel grabs the side of the metal footrail and stops immediately jerking you backward from the momentum you had generated and causes you to either lose balance or fall altogether.

Now, these color-changing walls of this airport tunnel are really pretty cool. It 's this translucent textured plastic with panels that gradually change colors fading in & out to different hues. Very pretty indeed. BUT… a distraction from where you are going nonetheless.

Some people stop altogether and stand there 'ooing & aaahing' at the prettiness of the changing lights. Others watch the lights while still trying to get where they’re going but cause commotion bumping into people, tripping, falling, generally wreaking havoc in the tunnel. Others have been through this tunnel before and while they may notice the pretty lights, they are not distracted from their mission.

At the airport, you have a destination, a primary destination which is the other city you are headed to. But you also have intermediate destinations along the way required for you to get to your final destination [which is not really final because at some point from there you’re off to another and another and another.] In life, as in airports, there is never a final destination. There is always the next trip. That is, until you meet your creator in Heaven which is the ultimate final destination and a talk perhaps better left for Sunday morning.

Traveling through an airport is a small but great analogy for your life. Like a trip you take on an airplane, in life, you have a destination, many destinations… or wait… do you?

Booking a flight is easy: you determine where you want to go and then you get online, search your flight dates & options and book it with the click of a mouse or touch of a pad.

If only people would practice their life the same simple way. Where do you want to go? When do you want to be there? From there, where is your next stop? Commitment is the means of persisting and perseveringuntil you reach your next destination.

But commitment to reaching that destination requires that you have one.

Having a dream and committing to it go hand-in-hand. You cannot commit to achieving a dream you do not have and you will not commit to achieving a dream that is not meaningful enough to get your elephant’s attention. We’ve heard a lot of talk recently about a great book, The Ant and the Elephant: Leadership For the Self, and in talking with Orrin, you’re going to hear more because it’s that important. In that book Poschente sets forth 5 C’s for building peak performance. The first C is Clarify Your Vision.

I want to distinguish real quick the difference between a dream and goals which are so often confused as being the same thing. They are not. Your dream is the vision you have of your future. It’s more than an achievement. It’s a state of being, it’s freedom, it’s purpose, it’s something that will, at some point, bring you to tears. It is significant enough to become a driving force in your waking life. The journey is a lot more fun if you know where you’re going. That's the dream.

Goals on the other hand, are the milestones of achievement and progress on the way to seeing your vision become a reality. Goals make up the strategy points for you to move along the journey. The goals you set become your route. They are the A & B gates, the baggage claims, and the parking garages in the airports, the things you need to get to & through in order to get to the next stop along the journey. They are the checkpoints of success. Team 492- A Checkpoint Race- Chris & Terri Brady. I would recommend you pick it up in the TL 136 - Apprenticeship Pack.

Just like taking a trip, success in your business or really, in anything you do in your life: a good marriage, raising good kids, building healthy relationships, living a healthy lifestyle, literally anything and everything has a vision of where you want it to be and what is required to get there. You will have the checkpoint A & B gates to get there and you will also have the blinking lights, the changes, the obstacles, challenges, bumps and issues (the turbulence)along the way and in your way. Overcoming these is impossible without a commitment to your dream, your vision of tomorrow. To have that commitment, you must clarify your vision.

We’re all on a journey whether we know it or not. If you could go anywhere, where would you like to go? We are all traveling inevitably toward the ends of our lives. So, a very relevant questions for each of us is whether we’re going to choose the destination or allow ourselves to be swept along with the tide and let others decide where we end up. That choice is for each of us to choose.

The picture of success isn’t the same for any 2 people because we’re all created differently and are unique. But the process is the same for everyone.

Success is… defining your purpose in life and growing to reach your maximum potential.

So, your commitment is dependent on the meaning of your dream and how clearly you see your picture. The more clearly you see it, you feel it, you live it in your imagination at a subconscious level, the more you do on the conscious level to see it a reality. It creates the faith necessary for success in any area of life. Faith is the belief in things unseen. You have an intended/desired/expected result that you envision. You have to believe in your potential. You cannot consistently act in a manner inconsistent with the way you see yourself. If you don’t believe you have potential, you will never try to reach it. And if you never try to reach your potential, you will never be successful. President Roosevelt said, “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” If you do that with a focus on your purpose, your dream, there is nothing else anyone can ever ask of you. The commitment then, is to work toward your potential and believe with the faith that you can. As you do, you will realize success. With Team and Mona Vie, we have everything we need to “Do what we can, with what we have, where we are.”

Faith is a product of having the right people to follow, the right system to leverage, and doing the right things with the right strategy to make progress… to grow toward our potential. Leveraging the right information with the right activity on a foundation of belief & commitment (right attitude) produces success. The formula for success looks something like this:

RIGHT INFORMATION + RIGHT ACTIVITY = RIGHT RESULTS

RIGHT ATTITUDE

(by right ‘attitude’ I mean the hunger, focus, desire, belief)
The right attitude is the RIGHT commitment.

Here’s what commitment to your dream creates: you align your actions with your intentions. You can only do this if you can clearly see where you’re going, what you have to do to get there, and continually looking up at the prize (whatever yours is).

The 1st step in the activity pattern for success in any area is to DEFINE what that success looks like for you. What is it? It must have depth of meaning. Only then, can you commit to doing what is necessary to having it. This is the essence of that cliché, “If the dream is big enough, the facts don’t count.” What that means is this: if your dream is meaningful enough, then whatever you have to do, whatever you have to go through, whatever you have to change, overcome, become, the people you have to help, and the difference you have to make, you will do because your dream is worth it.

The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have been and what we have become.

The definition of hell is when the person you are meets the person you could have been.

Success comes as a result of growing to our potential. So, are you committed to becoming who you can become. Now, Henry Ford said about your potential- “There is no man living who isn’t capable of doing more than he thinks he can do.” We can do anything. We have nearly limitless potential and yet so few ever even try to reach it.

The commitment you have to your success is directly proportional to the meaning your dream has to you and the clarity with which you can envision having it. It is the difference between chasing a dream and building a business. That perspective determines the journey. It determines your attitude. It determines your commitment which does 2 things:

i. Your commitment is tested by action:
It’s one thing to talk about commitment; it’s entirely another thing to do something about it. See, the only real measure of commitment, is action.

ii. Your commitment Opens the door to Achievement.
There will be challenges and obstacles you’ll face. Commitment will often be the only thing that carries you forward.

“Commitment is the enemy of resistance because it is the serious promise to press on, to get up, no matter how many times you get knocked down.”

Here's a quick strategy to strengthen your commitment:

1.    Concentrate on 1 main goal.
Reaching your potential requires focus. Your purpose is so important because it gives you the clarity of vision that Poschente talks about in the Ant & Elephant. Maybe your first goal is Go-Getter, Power Player, Team 10 or Turbo 10. Whatever it is, that’s your primary focus to achieve NOW. Meet with your mentor to define what that immediate goal should be for you & one for your team. Once you know what that goal is, decide what you’re willing to sacrifice to achieve it. If you want to accomplish great things, be willing to sacrifice much. The price of your time & energy is worth achieving the meaning behind your dream. Your actions will align with your intentions.

2.    Concentrate on personal growth- continued improvement.
Continual improvement is the key to reaching your potential and to being successful. Both of these capitalize on The Slight Edge: Secret to a Successful Life. A book I highly recommend understanding. Each day you become better than you were yesterday. Your actions toward the 1 main goal and the steps to continually improve compound. Every little thing you do puts you one step closer to your potential and to your success. As you move closer to achieving your goal, you will also see who you are becoming along the way.

3.    Forget the Past.
You cannot gain any momentum if you’re dragging the past behind you. You cannot make any progress looking over your shoulder. “Yesterday ended last night.” No matter what you have encountered in the past, you have the potential to overcome it.

4.    Focus on your future.
Think about it: It’s the only place we have to go. There’s a proverb that says, “He who does not look ahead, remains behind.”

Make sure you have your copies of The Ant and the Elephant: Leadership For the Self and of The Slight Edge: Secret to a Successful Life. Both will help with defining your vision and committing to it.

Let me leave you with this…
What specific destination are you steering your life toward right now?
And what are doing about it?

Shoot for the moon. For even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.

Freedom's Need for Leadership

2010-03-11T09:52:00.002-05:00

America is starving for leadership. She is physically suffering from leadership malnutrition. I just finished reading an article posted by Orrin Woodward about what we can expect if we continue to starve our nation and our country of sound leadership focused on preserving the foundations necessary to be a free country.

Freedom isn't free and people who treat it lightly are likely to lose it.

Orrin's article makes significant points about where we are headed if we don't accept the responsibility of changing it.

Leadership is not done in a vacuum, meaning without freedom there is no leadership. If people have power over you, they don't use leadership, but will resort to force as it is much easier to compel than influence. This principle is as old as the history of man, but doesn't seem to sink in easily, if at all. I encourage everyone to read and think through Kitty's personal story. Ideas do have consequences and the ideas you do not know still can have consequences in your life. I believe American leaders have a responsibility to speak about the precious gift of freedom as leadership is pointless in a totalitarian system. Patrick Henry said it right nearly 250 years ago, "Give me liberty or give me death." The Founding Fathers understood that freedom was non-negotiable and we must learn this lesson before it is to late.

This is the introduction to an extremely enlightening firsthand account of a tragic loss of freedom.

America truly is the Greatest Country in the World. Don't Let Freedom Slip Away  

By: Kitty Werthmann

What I am about to tell you is something you've probably never heard or will ever read in history books.    I believe that I am an eyewitness to history...

THE REST OF THE STORY

Orrin Woodward - 2010 TOP 10 LEADERSHIP WEBSITE AWARDS!

2010-02-23T09:18:00.000-05:00

It looks like the International Association of Businesses has discovered what many of us have known and what we were reminded of this past weekend in St. Louis at the Team Winter Leadership Convention- that Orrin Woodward is a leader of leaders.

The International Association of Businesses is a non profit corporation to help and assist small businesses start, grow and effectively create jobs in the US. Their website link and a recent post listing the the 2010 Top 10 Leadership Website Awards is below.

TOP 10 LEADERSHIP WEBSITES
International Association of Businesses highlights the following website nominations in contention for the 2010 TOP 10 LEADERSHIP WEBSITE AWARDS!

The Top 10 represent the “Cream of the Crop” and apply their own leadership principals to achieve both qualitative and quantitave results in their own organization. They also develop and influence leaders and leadership throughout American businesses.

As you send back your nominations to iabusa@yahoo.com, please consider the following:
- Originality of ideas
- Practicality of ideas
- Presentation style
- International outlook
- Impact of ideas
- Quality of web content, publications and writings
- Ranking of website in US and International

The Top 10 Leadership Websites include:
www.jimcollins.com : Jim Collins
www.giantimpact.com : John Maxwell
www.stephencovey.com : Stephen Covey
www.kenblanchard.com : Ken Blanchard
www.robinsharma.com : Robin Sharma
www.marshallgoldsmith.com : Marshall Goldsmith
www.tompeters.com : Tom Peters
www.tonyrobbins.com : Anthony Robbins
www.straightfromthegut.com : Jack Welch
www.orrinwoodward.com : Orrin Woodward

Again, for additional entries and submissions, please send name, website
and why you think this person should be considered part of the
Top 10 Leadership Websites to: iabusa@yahoo.com.

Orrin Woodward Live on the Home Business Radio Show with Tom Chenault

2010-02-17T12:55:00.002-05:00

Hear Orrin Woodward interviewed by Tom Chenault on the Home Business Radio Show. Listen to Orrin discuss leadership, personal responsibility, character, integrity, free enterprise and the opportunities before us today.

Here are just a few of the nuggets shared in the short radio interview:

No matter how good you are at anything, you’re only as good as you are worth following. People buy into who you are before they buy into anything else.

Hear Orrin discuss why the Team organization is such a strong organization. It is because Team members are more focused and more driven than most other organizations. It’s a result of the culture created on the Team. Great things happen when people buy into a grand vision and begin moving in the same direction toward that vision. The team culture aligns people’s visions and activity for maximum results. They create that flow and that momentum that creates the results that each person is after. That culture creates the focus and action to produce consistent results and the leader sets the tone of the group- the leader creates the culture. The compounded effect is big-time results.

The speed of the group is the speed of the leader.

Orrin’s blog is top-notch on so many things- politics, freedom, leadership, making a difference beginning with ourself.

America was founded on personal accountability. There was no government to get a hand out from back then. It was created with the dreams and efforts of the American people. Our dreams & ideas are the new frontiers.

Network marketing is the greatest model of free enterprise because no one gets paid based on title. Everyone starts at zero with the unlimited potential to build a business to whatever level they are willing to lead themselves and to lead others.

Real leadership has nothing to do with titles. It has everything to do with service to others.

Launching a Leadership Revolution is perhaps the best foundational beginning and strategy to implement the development of your own personal leadership and that of your organization.

Hunger is the driving force behind any significant success. The real foundation of all leadership is being a hungry student. It’s more than just showing up. In your own business, your pay raise becomes effective when you do.

Every one of us had the ability to transcend yourself to become the person worthy of following. The effort to succeed closes the gap between success and a lack of it.

Tom Chenault commented that the vision and impact of Team will effect the whole world. That the whole idea of culture is so powerful.

Learn more about Orrin here:

www.orrinwoodward.com

Starting Successfully

2010-02-08T23:19:00.008-05:00

In today’s internet world, information about pretty much everything comes at us a-mile-a-minute and in such impossible volumes to manage. Somehow, we have to wade through all the advice, good & bad, and all the “you can do it” encouragement and actually begin to do something. With the incredible bombardment of our senses, it’s sometimes hard to even know what the first step should be. “Where do I start?” “What do I do now, like, right now?” “How do I begin and where do I begin it?” Amidst the confusion, it’s so easy to put off doing anything.

Once we do figure out where to start, it's important to get off to a good one. In reality, we are all starting daily. Every day is new day and in each day we simply start again.

Starting successfully begins with accepting responsibility for not only where I’m at right now, but, more so, where I’m going to be.

“Before anything else, getting ready is the secret of success.” Henry Ford

We have to become self-starters. John Maxwell calls it the Great Separator. There are Doer’s and Do-Nots. It is essential to be a self-starter. It’s important to always remember a simple basic principal: To Win – We Must Begin.

“To Succeed, jump as quickly at opportunities as you do at conclusions.” Ben Franklin

Starting Successfully
START with yourself.
The first question we must answer is not where do I start – it’s who do you start. As Ghandi plainly put it, we must “Be the change you want to see in the world.” We must be the change we envision and it begins with 'me'.

The Value of Starting With Myself:
First, starting with myself gives me experience, gives me confidence, gives me integrity and gives me influence. And remember, Leadership is nothing more than influence. Second, I am with myself more than anyone else. Some of you didn’t know that. Others are thinking, boy that Matt, he’s about as sharp as a bowling ball. You have to be the one to push your own start button. In a way, since you’re with yourself so much, you have to become your own mentor; to hold yourself accountable; to develop self-discipline and self-mastery. Third, I must start with myself in order to give to others. I must realize that I’m the only person I have any control over. But the magic is in understanding the paradox of power that control of myself leads to the influence of others… to follow your lead. Starting with myself permits me to give to others. It can be difficult trying to help others if you don’t help yourself first.

The #1 Leadership Principle At West Point is ”Lead by Example”. It’s really the only way to lead. People do what they see. Be the example you want others to follow. Be someone you would want on your team.

START early.
Start early in every aspect: daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. The value of starting early is this… it allows you to tap into The Slight Edge: Secret to a Successful Life- the power of compounding: The earlier you start, the more power you have. I don’t necessarily mean get up at 6am and start working. What I mean is, don’t put off till tomorrow what you can complete today! It’s the smallest seemingly insignificant things we do daily that accumulate into the biggest results.

The Value of Starting Early:

1. You increase your odds of success.
2. You compound your success.
3. You have more options later in life.

Though you cannot go back
And make a brand new start, my friend,
Anybody can start from now,
And make a brand new end!

START small.
This one is important because we can get intimidated in beginning what may seem like a monumental journey with no end in sight. Don’t expect to understand everything it takes to get to the top right away. Just take the next step. It’s the daily things you do that get you closer. Don’t think you have to have all the answers or that you to have everything figured out before you start. Just begin.

A solid philosophy to begin is: Think Big & Start Small. The first 2 steps to start effectively are to first, Define your dream, your vision of your success and, second, commit to seeing it through. You can decide to do both right where you are… right now!

The Advantages of Starting Small:
1. It encourages you to get started. Hard work is an accumulation of easy things you didn’t do when you should have. Starting small allows you to experience progress quickly reinforcing your activity. When you accomplish a small step, you provide yourself encouragement that you can accomplish the next step. Set small goals that build confidence. Each day maybe it’s simply listening to an audio, reading one chapter of a good book, or making one contact.

2. It allows you to prioritize and concentrate. Focusing on the next best thing you need to do creates progress and clarity of purpose. “If you can’t feed 1,000 people, then feed one.” Mother Theresa

3. It provides the necessary step to take the next step. You put one foot in front of the other, and soon you’ll be walking out the door. (Santa Claus is Comin' to Town). The next step is the necessary step to take the next step!

One bright morning a boy rushed to get up and get out to the beach. There had been a terrible storm the night before and he could just imagine all the treasures that had washed ashore during the night. When the boy got to the beach he was amazed to see the beach covered with thousands of starfish. They had been washed way up onto the sand and were starting to dry out. The boy, knowing that they would die, began to pick them up and throw them back into the water. A man who was strolling on the beach watched the boy frantically rushing to throw the starfish back into the ocean. The man approached the boy and said, "You know you can never throw all of these starfish back into the ocean. There are too many and they are already dying. Your throwing them back won't make any difference." The little boy carrying another starfish in his hands, stopped and looked into the man's eye thoughtfully… then tossing the starfish into the waves he replied, "It makes a difference to that one!" and he rushed off to saving more of the dying starfish.

What you are going to be tomorrow you are becoming today… step by step.

START with the end in mind.
As you begin . . . look way out there.

“I will get ready and perhaps my chance will come.” Abraham Lincoln

“It’s too late to prepare when opportunity comes.” John Wooden

We don’t get into a car and just start driving. We get in the car, put the key in the ignition, shift, brake, hit the gas, hit the turn signal, all because we’re going somewhere! People spend more time planning their grocery shopping than designing their future. The basic difference between people who live their dreams and those who only dream about how they would live is the accuracy of their plans and their ability to take action. You now have the knowledge to capture your dreams.

To start with the end in view, you need energy and direction. Let your passion, dream, and vision pull you forward to that end. Let your planning give you direction.

3 Reasons To Start With The End In View:
1) It gets you started right. All’s well that begins well.
    How do you get started right?
    A. Define your vision: What is your passion?
    B. Learn: What those who have been successful have learned; the principles of their success.
    C. Do: What those who have been successful have done/are doing. Listen to them; watch their life; follow their example; learn from their mistakes and their victories.

Maintain a positive healthy attitude visualizing where you’re going and do the work necessary to get there.

“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” Soren Kierkegaard

2) It keeps you going right. Starting with the end in sight, keeps you on track. It allows you to see it though. With clear vision, you have more energy to give which creates self- motivation. You have less energy to lose because you have direction. You see the big picture.

3) It gets you where you need to go. What gets measured gets done. Results! At this point we should have already learned that life isn’t fair and it isn’t going to be fair. Stop sniveling and whining and go out and make it happen for yourself.

Dick Butler, an Advertising Executive and International Consultant wrote: “In business I see too many people who expect the financial tooth fairy to come at night and remove that ugly dead tooth from under the pillow and substitute profitability just in the nick of time at the end of their fiscal year.”

Success does not arrive, your ship isn’t going to come in… you’re going to have to swim out and get it yourself.

START – NOW!
If you wait for the perfect time to start, it’ll never come.

“A year from now you may wish you had started today.” Karen Lamb

3 Reasons To Start Now:
1. Because the Power is in the present! Required reading to grasp this concept and the perspective to capitalize on it are The Magic of Thinking Big by Dr. David Schwartz & Today Matters: 12 Daily Practices to Guarantee Tomorrows Success (Maxwell, John C.).

One of my favorite Maxwell quotes is that “We over-exaggerate yesterday. We overestimate tomorrow. We underestimate today.”

“One today is worth two tomorrows.” Ben Franklin

2. It removes the greatest barrier to your success: ☢Procrastination☢
I think that word is toxic. It's the ninja dream killer- you never see it coming until it's too late. The best way to never achieve anything… is to never start anything. We certainly won’t have to worry about any critics or adversity if we never attempt anything. Do nothing, be nothing, say nothing.

Anybody who brags about what they’re going to do tomorrow probably did the same thing yesterday! That’s called Destination Disease. It’s the ‘I’ll get to it tomorrow’ syndrome. Procrastination is the assassination of motivation. Knowledge is power only when it is applied. Do it now!

“The greatest gap is between knowing and doing.” Dick Biggs

“Today is the day you worried about yesterday.” Alice Klendworth

3. It is the open door for opportunity.
And it is right before you this very moment. It is simply a matter of reaching out your arm, putting your hand on the doorknob to success, turning the knob, opening the door and taking that first step through the doorway. It’s the job that never started that takes the longest to finish.

“Most people fail in the starting.” Maureen Falcone

“Start now, because tomorrow may not be yours to start.” Sherrie Perry

And one of my all-time favorites comes from Mr. Mikey Kasem:

“You can’t leave footprints in the sands of time if you’re sitting on your butt. And who wants to leave buttprints in the sands of time?”

The problem is that we want the rewards of success without paying the price.
Author Seth Godin wrote: “You don’t win an Olympic gold medal with a few weeks of intensive training.” “There’s no such thing as an overnight opera sensation. Great law firms or design companies don’t spring up overnight . . . Every great company, every great brand, and every great career has been built in exactly the same way; bit by bit, step by step, little by little.” There is no magic solution to success.

The formula for success is simple:
WHAT DO YOU WANT – DETERMINE THE PRICE – START PAYING IT.

“How wonderful it is that we need not wait a single minute before starting to improve ourselves and our world”. -Anne Frank

As we ponder the arduous journey toward success, take ownership of your vision and of your progress toward it. Manage your attitude, your activity, your priorities… and discipline is the by-product.

Knowledge is not power unless it is used. Love is not divine unless it is expressed. Life is not the purest joy imaginable unless we act with every fiber of our being in its realization. Tom James, Personal Development Coach

You can only master those things in your life through use, action, and implementation. Do something to move yourself closer to your dream every day starting TODAY! And you’ll make a bigger difference than you ever thought you could.

I remember hearing Orrin Woodward once say that “the greatest sin is to be given the gift of life and return it unopened.” Let that not be said of you & I.

Start with yourself.
Start small.
Keep your dream big enough to keep it pulling you forward.
And lead yourself and your team to victory.
Make 2010 your best ever!
It’s within your control.
And it starts NOW!

Good Quality Leadership

2010-02-01T12:07:00.003-05:00

Someone just sent me an email presenting a list of thought provoking quotes from Ronald Reagan with a subject heading that simply said... "Miss me yet?" What I think we miss is good quality leadership with a vision for preserving America's freedoms. Here are President Reagan's thoughts:

"Socialism only works in two places: Heaven where they don't need it and hell where they already have it."

'Here's my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose.'

"The most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"

'The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so.'

'Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.'

'I have wondered at times about what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress.'

'The taxpayer: That's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination.'

'Government is like a baby: An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.'

'The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth is a government program.'

'It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.'

'Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.'

'Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed, there are many rewards; if you disgrace yourself, you can always write a book.'

'No arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is as formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women.'

'If we ever forget that we're one nation under GOD, then we will be a nation gone under.'

'Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States.'

'Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.'

'How do you tell a communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.'

‘The ultimate determinant in the struggle now going on for the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas-a trial of spiritual resolve: the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish and the ideals to which we are dedicated.’

‘To sit back hoping that someday, someway, someone will make things right is to go on feeding the crocodile, hoping he will eat you last–but eat you he will.'

‘You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.’

Commentary on Social Leadership

Top Leadership Gurus

Every Leader's Challenge

2010-01-25T11:29:00.003-05:00

One characteristic all effective leaders embrace is honest introspection. Orrin Woodward recently wrote an article touching on this very subject and commented that honest self-analysis was "Every Leader's challenge." Jim Collins in Good to Great called it "confronting the brutal reality." The lesson here is to not be fooled into the trap of Woodward's Law. Read on...

Sturgeon's Law and Tri Level Leadership

By Orrin Woodward

I read recently of Sturgeon's Law that states that 90% of anything is crud. Theodore Sturgeon developed his law in arguing against critics who didn't like science fiction books. His answer defended the best of the science fiction genre. Like anything in life, cream rises to the top and only a few are willing to do what it takes to climb the mountain. As I thought on Sturgeon's Law, I realized that it tied in perfectly with Chris Brady and my Tri-Lateral Leadership Ledger (TLLL) from our #1 Wall Street Journal Best Seller, Launching a Leadership Revolution. The idea behind the TLLL is that leaders must develop their skills in Character, Task and Relationships in order to influence effectively. Sturgeon's Law ties in with the TLLL by revealing that only 10% of the people will excel with character, only 10% will excel in task and only 10% excel in relationships.

The TLLL scores you on a scale from 1 to 10 in each of the three areas and then multiplies the scores together for a total leadership score. 1000 being the highest theoretical score that you can achieve - 10x10x10 and zero being the lowest score possible. Sturgeon's Law reveals that only 10%x10%x10% will excel in all three areas necessary to effectively lead. This amounts to 1 out of 1000 that lead people with character, task and relationships. This number matches with what I have learned experimentally through building communities. You have a performer for every 100 to 150 people and you have a true leader for every 1000 people associating in your community. This is just another example of how rare true leadership is. When you find someone with Character, Task and Relationship, it is important to serve them and reward them. John Maxwell says, "Everything rises and falls on leadership" and I concur.

How are you doing in the three areas? The tendency is to overrate yourself when you think through the TLLL. If you are part of a networking community and have 1000 people attending your leadership events, then you are scoring around 350 points. A 100 people at leadership events is around 100 points. Every leader has room to grow because none of us have hit anywhere close to 1000 points. What are your numbers at your training events? The numbers do not lie even if we may desire to inflate our scores. This leads me to Woodward's Law which is a natural Corollary to Sturgeon's Law pertaining to leadership. Woodward's Law - 90% of the leaders are convinced they are part of the 10% in Sturgeon's Law. Ok, that may sound strong, but self-deception has costs more people success than any other single factor. Is anything good coming from self-deception in your life? Is ignorance truly bliss?

Why do people desire to live with comfortable lies when only the uncomfortable truths will set you free? Every leader should assess their strengths and weaknesses on the TLLL and then changes what needs to be changed. In leadership, you cannot take your old self into your new reality. If you are not happy with the results you are getting then stop blaming God, society, your parents, your team, your mentor, your situation, etc. and place the blame squarely on the one person who can do something about your character, your task, and your relationships. 2010 is the year to Play to Win! Are you Playing to Win?

God Bless, Orrin Woodward

Orrin Woodward NY Times, Wall St. Journal, USA Today, Money & Business Weekly best selling co-author of Launching a Leadership Revolution & 2010 Top 25 Leadership Gurus List. Orrin's blog is an Alltop selection and ranked in HR's Top 100 Blogs for Management & Leadership. http://orrinwoodward.blogharbor.com/blog

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Orrin_Woodward

Presidential Leadership

2010-01-20T23:15:00.005-05:00

Yesterday I received an email from my niece asking for my opinion on leadership for her school newspaper. Here's what she asked:

Hi everyone! Kali here! For school I'm doing a newspaper, and I have a couple questions for you. Would you please take a few minutes to answer the following questions. Thanks in advance for your time!

#1. what do you think makes a good leader?

#2. what president do you think has displayed good leadership?

#3. do you think Obama is a good leader?

why or why not?

In thinking about her questions and my personal opinion on each, I thought I'd defer the context of my answers on President Obama's leadership to someone who perhaps has a better grasp of the political nature of some of these questions. I also wanted to make sure it was consistent with my understanding of what 'good' leadership is.

In doing a very quick google search using certain key words like 'Obama' and 'Leadership,' I came across an article in the top 3 or 4 hits that I think accurately describes both. Here are a few excerpts I have chosen from that article to answer the specific questions Kali was asking. The author and complete article can be found here and I would emphatically encourage you to read it. It seems to be an objective analysis of President Obama’s leadership.

Leadership, Obama Style
Consider the president's leadership style, which has now become clear: deliver a moving speech, move on, and when push comes to shove, leave it to others to decide what to do if there's a conflict, because if there's a conflict, he doesn't want to be anywhere near it. Leadership means heading into the eye of the storm and bringing the vessel of state home safely, not going as far inland as you can because it's uncomfortable on the high seas. This president has a particular aversion to battling back gusting winds from his starboard side (the right, for the nautically challenged) and tends to give in to them. He just can't tolerate conflict, and the result is that he refuses to lead.

...It's the job of the president to be in the fray. It's his job to lead us out of it, not to run from it. It's his job to make the tough decisions and draw lines in the sand. But Obama really doesn't seem to want to get involved in the contentious decisions. They're so, you know, contentious. He wants us all to get along. Better to leave the fights to the Democrats in Congress since they're so good at them. He's like an amateur boxer who got a coupon for a half day of training with Angelo Dundee after being inspired by the tapes of Mohammed Ali. He got "float like a butterfly" in the morning but never made it to "sting like a bee."

...He doesn't need a chief of staff. He needs someone to shake him until he feels something strongly enough not just to talk about it but to act.

No Vision, No Message
The second problem relates to the first. The president just doesn't want to enunciate a progressive vision of where this country should be heading in the 21st century, particularly a progressive vision of government and its relation to business. He doesn't want to ruffle what he believes to be the feathers of the American people, to offer them a coherent, emotionally resonant, values-driven message -- starting with an alternative to Ronald Reagan's message that government is the problem and not the solution -- and to see if they might actually follow him.

...And that's where the problem of message comes in. This White House has no coherent message on anything. [emphasis added]

The Politics of the Lowest Common Denominator
And capping off all of these aspects of the president's leadership style is his preference for the lowest common denominator. That means you don't really have to fight, you don't have to take anybody on, you don't take any risks. You just find what the public is so upset about that even the Republicans would stipulate to it if forced to (e.g., that excluding people from health care because they have "pre-existing conditions" is something we can't continue to tolerate) and build it into whatever plan the special interests can hammer out around it.

... But you have to believe something.

I don't honestly know what this president believes. But I believe if he doesn't figure it out soon, start enunciating it, and start fighting for it, he's not only going to give American families hungry for security a series of half-loaves where they could have had full ones, but he's going to set back the Democratic Party and the progressive movement by decades, because the average American is coming to believe that what they're seeing right now is "liberalism," and they don't like what they see. I don't, either.

None of this is Leadership. It's not even 'bad' leadership which is not leadership at all but nothing more than pandering to the whims of others- typically those who serve the supposed leader's best interests, instead of the followers the leader is supposed to be leading [ie- serving]. No vision, no character or integrity, no direction, no example… No leadership.  What you see IS always what you get! If what we’re seeing is floundering liberalism as the author of this article describes, then guess what? That’s what it is.

What they're seeing is weakness, waffling, and wandering through the wilderness without an ideological compass. That's a recipe for going nowhere fast...

So then, if this is NOT leadership that we're seeing in the current presidential example, then Leadership is, perhaps, the opposite. Leadership is strength, conviction, and direction through a clear vision based upon an ideological compass. It is a recipe for going where you want to be... as efficiently and effectively as possible.   Who then would be a good example of such leadership?

Let's look at our 40^th president, Ronald Reagan. Through his living example we have a timeless model of presidential leadership.

Character

First and perhaps most important is that Leadership, at its core, begins with who you are. President Reagan was described by people who worked for him as a kind, humble, and decent person who was void of meanness and pettiness. To become an effective leader, in any arena, you must start with yourself. It begins with the necessary self-examination that leads you to first, confront the brutal reality of who you are and to intentionally work to improve and expand the personal qualities necessary to strengthen your character. Without character, nothing will work. A leader must be someone worth following. In the best-selling book Launching a Leadership Revolution, Chris Brady and Orrin Woodward define a leader as ..the influence of others in a productive, vision-driven direction and is done through the example, conviction and character of the leader.

Have a Great Vision

Be a dream-maker. From the beginning, Ronald Reagan communicated an optimistic picture of America. He had campaigned on two major goals. The first was to revitalize the economy, and the second, to rebuild our military capability and restore our position in world leadership. And that is what he set out to do. “America is too great for small dreams,” said Ronald Reagan. This is so true for great leaders who are not satisfied with small dreams. Instead of trying to get just an edge over the Soviet Union, Reagan went after the total dismantling of the “Evil Empire.” And he succeeded. If you want to be a great leader, ask yourself and your team: What is the greatest dream we can possibly have for this organization? This is indeed what President Reagan did.

The Ability to Communicate

Having a vision of what needs to be done is crucial for a leader. But what truly distinguishes a leader from others is the ability to communicate this vision in such a compelling way as to attract followers who become excited about the vision and commit to achieving it. Reagan was not just a good communicator, but was called, “The Great Communicator.”

Offer Hope and Engage in Action

Reagan was the eternal optimist. He offered Americans a positive, uplifting vision of America and its future. He believed in freedom and therefore acted on behalf of the values and ideals that made it great. Unlike the current president, he did not criticize the very country he was chosen to lead nor did he apologize for its greatness or its strong Christian foundation. Ronald Reagan continually referred to the United States as The Shining City on the Hill. He matched his optimistic temperament with bold, persistent action. Everyone could actually ‘see’ this vision and feel good about it.

Build a Solid Team

Ronald Reagan accomplished so much as president because he delegated so much. He believed in appointing good people that shared his ideological convictions and that he could count on to carry out his policy. Reagan was a leader, not a manager and he surrounded himself with other leaders with strength of character, shared vision for America, and the willingness & commitment to serve its people. This is drastically different than the partisan politics and self-serving agendas we see rampant in the White House and Congress today.

Conclusion

Our position of leadership in the world today is in serious jeopardy as we don’t seem to have clear-cut objectives and goals and even less clear-cut strategies to achieve them. This is a direct result from a lack of leadership. Leadership is not political and it is not partisan. It is doing the right things for the right reasons no matter what the political ramifications. Margaret Thatcher in her great eulogy of Ronald Reagan summarized in one sentence his personal qualities and his great achievements: “In his lifetime, Ronald Reagan was such a cheerful and invigorating presence that it was easy to forget what daunting historic tasks he set himself. He sought to mend America's wounded spirit, to restore the strength of the free world and to free the slaves of Communism.” The Reagan legacy and President Reagan’s leadership example provide the guidelines for a future in which we have peace, freedom, and the flourishing of the human spirit, which will be a benefit not only to the United States but the whole world. It’s the very magic that can restore America as that Shining City on the Hill.

Here is a wonderful Tribute to Ronald Reagan. For President Reagan's personal response to this debate... well, just watch this: Reagan's Response.

Well Kali, I hope this provides some thoughtful answers to the mighty middle school questions in your email. More adults need to be asking those very same questions and thinking hard on the answers. You're way ahead of the game.

Whatever Your Goals... Plan to Hit Them

2010-01-13T13:37:00.000-05:00

Whatever your goals may be for 2010, it helps to have a plan and strategy to achieve them.

The Top 10 Secrets to Achieving Any Goal

We all have goals that are important to us. They range from quitting smoking, to creating our own businesses, to raising great kids. Unfortunately, most of us also have the experience of being unable to reach our goals, of having them always seem just out of reach. We can see them. We want to complete them, but we never quite cross that finish line. Here are 10 steps that are almost like magic! They will help you reach your goals, every time!

1. Precisely define the objective. Exactly what do you want? Measure it, put a number on it. How many pounds do you want to lose? How many dollars do you want to earn? No one can achieve a fuzzy goal. Be precise.

2. Align the objective with your values. You won't work toward a goal that conflicts with your values or sense of purpose. Make sure your goals are consistent with your religious and moral beliefs, and with other goals that you have. Internal conflict will undermine your performance, every time!

3. Develop appropriate affirmations. A series of positive, powerful, present-tense statements that describe the benefits of having your goal and how you'll feel when you've reached it are essential. They should be short, active, exciting, and you will need to write them down and repeat them many times, every day!

4. Develop powerful reasons to achieve your goals. "If you have enough why's, you'll find a way." We reach goals that excite us, that stimulate our imaginations. We reach goals that are vital to our health, our family and our future. Find lots of reasons! When it's important enough, you'll make it happen.

5. Write your goals and your reasons down! Write them on file cards every day! There is power, magic and mystery in writing your goals down. Put the cards where you'll see them through the day. Put them on your mirror, or on your desk. Carry them with you and read them, over and over, through the day.

6. Set a deadline. Again, have the courage to be exact. Quit smoking by your birthday, double your income by the end of this year, get out of debt by September 1st. A goal without a deadline is just a pipe dream! Give yourself the discipline of a date.

7. Define intermediate targets. To lose 40 pounds in 4 months, determine to lose 10 pounds EACH month. Having smaller goals makes each one easier to achieve, and you can track your progress to your larger goal. A journey of a thousand miles is just a series of steps, one after another.

8. Make your goals public. Tell friends and family what you plan to do, and your target date. Ask them to hold you accountable and to help you along the way. Knowing your friends are rooting for you is a powerful motivator. Set yourself up for success by making a public commitment to reach your goals on time.

9. Get a partner. High achievers rarely do anything significant by themselves. Get a running partner, make a friendly bet with your spouse to quit smoking, make it a family project to get out of debt. Always have at least one person who totally supports you, and make sure they are part of your campaign. Hire a coach, if appropriate.

10. Celebrate every intermediate victory! Give yourself a reward for each day without a cigarette, have a family celebration for each bill that gets paid off. High achievers find reasons to celebrate every day! Like that journey of a thousand miles, you must celebrate really celebrate! each step along the way.

Remember, "if you can imagine it, you can achieve it." Any goal that truly fires your imagination and fills your heart with joy, is reachable! Set targets, develop an adequate support system, break large goals into smaller steps, and go for it! You can do this!

Here's to your success!

Written by Dr. Philip E. Humbert, writer, speaker and success coach. Dr. Humbert has over 300 free articles, tools and resources for your success, including a great newsletter! It's all on his website at: www.philiphumbert.com

The following is a previous post by Orrin Woodward to plan your "attack on the status quo." Every month should have specific sum-certain goals in each and every facet of your business. It’s your own personal mentorship with Orrin on goal setting your Mona Vie Team business.

Goal Setting

by Orrin Woodward on Sun 09 Aug 2009 01:24 PM EDT | Permanent Link |

If you are going to hit a goal, you must have a goal. Goal setting is critical for high achievement! A person without a goal is like a ship without a rudder - directionless. Leaders set their own goals and help their team's set goals. Do you have a goal? Here is a short video on goal setting. God Bless, Orrin Woodward