Financial Winter Is Coming. Are You Prepared? The difference between the right call and the wrong call equates to comparing a photo taken from your phone with a piece of art.
By Grant Cardone Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Money requires your constant attention and the moment you stop hunting for it, it will escape you. You need to approach the creation of new money with a hungry-dog-on-the-back-of-a-meat-truck mentality. Let your customers know you are hungry. We live in an eat-what-you-can-kill economy. Having the ability to produce and grow a business without a lead, advertising or marketing is the truest form of freedom in any economy. I am not dependent on Facebook, Google, or any other entity for my business--I create my own economy.
Related: Be Hungry or Starve as an Entrepreneur
Don't be a financial dinosaur
Those that will come to financial ruin are the dinosaurs--people who do just enough to get by, don't have goals, won't do whatever it takes, and have an entitlement mentality. We live in a different world today than we did 30 years ago. The inability to adapt to changes in your environment will lead to extinction. Houses, stocks, IRA's--these are dying investments. The only species that will flourish going forward will be those that emerge nimble and adaptable. You don't want to be vulnerable to changes in your environment, rather you must change with it.
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At some point if you want to increase your income you will have to make a phone call to a person you don't know to ask them for something you need. Before the internet, emails, and even the telephone, the only way a person could sell their product was face to face knocking on doors. This lost art is easily the most valuable skill I have learned in my career. If you don't know how to sell, you are a creature on the endangered species list. In the coming years, a variety of pressures will cause the complacent to fall prey to the dominant in every industry.
Have the ability to go anywhere
If you have the ability to produce, you can literally go anywhere and do anything. If you can produce sales, not even a catastrophic shock such as the sudden cooling of the economic climate in 2008 will be a problem for you. Recessions dwindle the average person's bank account, but it can be your time to thrive because you will have a more varied diet than those around you by having multiple flows of income--not being dependent on one type of food. The Comfortable Middle-Class Guy is going to succumb to environmental pressures because he is content with his one salary.
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Never be the big fish in a little pond. You don't need special sales DNA to be great, but you do need to swim out in the open ocean where there are more leads, more opportunity, and more money. Remember that if you aren't expanding, you're shrinking. The middle class is becoming fossilized in its own mediocrity.
Don't be a dinosaur. Get obsessed with success. Pre-order my newest book Be Obsessed or Be Average today.
Be great,
GC
