Have you ever said to your child or to a loved one, \u201cYou can be anything you want to be, anything you dream of being\u201d? If you have, you are not alone, but I\u2019m sorry to tell you that you\u00a0lied. Not deliberately, of course, but it is a blatant falsehood. Shocked? Don\u2019t be. Instead, it\u2019s time to stop the madness and get real. That\u2019s hard to do, because our culture has inculcated this belief in our unlimited potential in most every one of us, just as we have all been taught to believe that money doesn\u2019t bring happiness\u2014which is also untrue.<\/p>\n
W. Clement Stone<\/strong>, the insurance man and author of numerous books on success, who in the last century was the richest man in Chicago, was famous for saying, \u201cAnything the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.\u201d This ultimate optimist had the best of intentions, I\u2019m sure. And it\u2019s a message that we all want to hear: Sure, I want to be Warren Buffet<\/strong>, or at least have his billions. I wouldn\u2019t mind looking like Brad Pitt<\/strong> while I\u2019m at it, and I would love to play tennis like Roger Federer<\/strong>, but those qualities are simply not in my genetic code.<\/p>\n That doesn\u2019t mean that I don\u2019t have other intrinsic strengths that have fueled or enhanced my success, however. What we should help our children to do is find those innate qualities and make the most of them. What\u2019s more, we should be doing this exercise ourselves if we haven\u2019t yet realized our own fullest potential. (Watch for future posts on how to do that.) We all have unique strengths and talents\u2014understanding them and maximizing them is critical to success\u2014indeed, to happiness.<\/p>\n The most important thing I learned while researching my book and interviewing the richest self-made person in each of the 100 largest American cities is that we can\u2019t be just anything we want to be. The good news, however, is that we can be so much more of what we innately are. We all come into this world with certain gifts, abilities, and inclinations. The key to success, and ultimately to wealth creation, is understanding what our own unique strengths are and then building a career or a business around them. There is real power in optimism, but there is even greater power in finding what I call your perfect pitch. Want examples? There are precisely 100 of them in The Richest Man in Town<\/em>. Read it and reap.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Have you ever said to your child or to a loved one, \u201cYou can be anything you want to be, anything you dream of being\u201d? If you have, you are not alone, but I\u2019m sorry to tell you that you lied. Not deliberately, of course, but it is a blatant falsehood. Shocked? Don\u2019t be. Instead, it\u2019s time to stop the madness and get real. That\u2019s hard to do, because our culture has inculcated this belief in our unlimited potential in most every one of us, just as we have all been taught to believe that money doesn\u2019t bring happiness\u2014which is also untrue.
\nW. Clement Stone<\/strong>, the insurance man and author of numerous books on success, who in the last century was the richest man in Chicago, was famous for saying, \u201cAnything the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.\u201d This ultimate optimist had the best of intentions, I\u2019m sure. And it\u2019s a message that we all want to hear: Sure, I want to be Warren Buffet<\/strong>, or at least have his billions. I wouldn\u2019t mind looking like Brad Pitt<\/strong> while I\u2019m at it, and I would love to play tennis like Roger Federer<\/strong>, but those qualities are simply not in my genetic code.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[122,124,123,120,121],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":407,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393\/revisions\/407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}