Honesty

This is very important in life is that anything you do you must be honest and not do anything to hurt other people especially when it comes to building your business as you do not want anyone else to do this to you  that is be dishonest with you

Let me tell you a story there was a little boy called Johnny and he wanted to sell as many bottles of lemonade top all his friends – but he knew that if he mixed only a little lemonade mix and put in more water he would make more money as the cost of making the drink would be less.

Guess what happened – when he did this and people bought his lemonade -it did not taste very good and eventually nobody bought his lemonade – he did not make any money as he was not honest in making good lemonade.

Although this is a very simple story it is important that you realize that if you are not honest it will eventually lead to many problems – if Johnny was honest in making and using the correct recipe he would have built good and trusted lemonade which everyone would have bought.

It also teaches you that if you decide to build a business – and you build up trust and be honest – other people will keep buying it as they know what they are getting.

I f you buy a bottle of Coca Cola – you know that the recipe will be correct and that coke will not put more water in – they are trusted and can be relied upon.

Learn to sell

This is very important in life and I want to explain to you why this is so important- if you do not learn how to do this an entrepreneur – you will really find it hard to do to make money in life- well let me explain

The reason for this is that everything involves some selling and people get paid to sell e.g. – if you walk through your neighborhood and see houses for sale – there is normally an advertisement outside the house – well assuming that the house is eventually sold – the person who sold the house gets paid for selling it – depending on how much the house was sold for he will get a share of the price – so if the sales person sells a very expensive house they will get more money for the sale

If you go to your local shopping center – you will see many shops selling things like food, toys and computers and so forth – this is how  shops get money for selling these things – the shops will advertise to your parents by offering good prices to them and friendly service.

The point I want you to know from this is the only way to get income is to sell things – this can be actual products or information – remember the example we read about that if you had knowledge about Lego you could sell this knowledge on the internet.

Try and sell things instead of being a buyer of things.

So you need to learn how to sell – how do you do this – there are many books on this subject but really the basics of selling are easy – I am not going to provide you with a list on how to sell – but as long as you know that this is important and you will read books and attend courses on it throughout life – so you will learn at your own pace.

If our lemonade entrepreneur had hundred of bottles of lemonade to sell but did not know how to sell them – he would not make any money- so learn how to sell – observe all the ways that companies do in order to sell their products e.g. big sign post on the side of the road, adverts on buses, advert banners on internet sites.

Set Goals

What is important is that you have goals or what you want to achieve in your life- if you want to be financially smart then you need to set this as a goal – I will relate this to a story – if you are playing football the main thing you and your team want to do is score a goal – that is your teams objective or goal and by doing this they will hopefully win the game.

Your team also has to defend the other team from scoring – so this is also a objective or goal of your team – to summarize – if your football team achieves these two goals – your team will win the game.

That is what I want you to do – write some goals down and take consistent action to achieve this by doing something everyday – it almost has to become a habit of learning what financial terms mean, how you are going to save and once you are clear what your goals are and you achieve them – it will really make you feel good – just like winning a game of football – except you are on the path of wealth education.

I will give you a few goals which I believe you should try to achieve

I.        Become financially literate- you are already achieving this goal by reading this as well as learning the words

II.        Save to invest

III.        Grow your income statement( making money) and balance sheet( investing that money to make more money)