Good morning, everyone!  This is Robert Allen and this is Breakfast With Bob on May 4, 2011. Come on in, let’s talk! It is the 4^th of May, 2011.

Our book today we’re going to converse about is, “Acres of Diamonds”, by Russell H. Conwell. It’s a short, little book; only forty pages in the version that I have. We’re going to be talking about it and referring also to, “Cash in a Flash”, my last book with Mark Victor Hansen. We’re going to be referring to chapter eleven in that book on page 162 and those of you who will be following along chapters eleven and twelve; we’ll cover that today. So have your finger in both of those, we’ll be talking about that. In addition to that, we’re going to be shifting our reading around just a little bit. Sometimes finding one of the authors of the books we’ve put on our short list of what to study this year is hard. Sometimes we have to move things around to fit in their schedule so we’ve been able to make an appointment with Nicholas Boothman who is the author of a very nitty gritty, good book that I like a lot, it’s called, “Convince Them in 90 Seconds or Less: Make Instant Connections That Pay Off in Business and in Life”, by Nicholas Boothman. So in about three weeks we’re still deciding whether it’s going to be a Breakfast With Bob call. We’re just nailing down the conversation whether it’s going to be on the eighteenth of May, or the twenty-fifth of May. We have not nailed down the actual date yet but that means we’re going to be discussing, in about two weeks, this book called, “Convince Them In 90 Seconds or Less”, by Nicholas Boothman. So those of you who want to read ahead, that’s a copy of the book you should get. It’s not a philosophical book, it’s a very nitty gritty, how do you really convince them in ninety seconds. I’m really looking forward to interviewing him so get ready to read that book like I have.

Now in terms of today’s conversation, the “Acres of Diamonds”, this is one of the classics. It has been around since… let’s see, it says that, at the very beginning, the introduction: “Acres of Diamonds”, before it was book, “Acres of Diamonds” was a wildly popular speech reportedly delivered around the world more than six thousand times. The speech’s author and presenter, American Russell Herman Conwell, was born in 1843 and he passed away in 1925. So he was Baptist Minister, a lawyer, a writer, an outstanding orator, and he was also the founder and first president of Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania which was largely created from the proceeds from his “Acres of Diamonds” speech. He wanted to start a university so Temple University, which was a name that anybody in America has heard, founded by the gentleman who wrote “Acres of Diamonds”. When you go to Temple University there’s a statue of Russell H. Conwell. He went around the country delivering this speech. When you read the book it’s kind of ‘speech’y, you can tell it’s like a written transcript of what would have delivered. What he was famous for, at least “Acres of Diamonds” is a story of him being a tourist and going down to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers many years ago with a party of English travellers. The old, Arab guide that he met up with in Baghdad was a story teller and told stories ad nauseum, just on and on and on, story after story. He says, ‘I saved my favorite story for my very special guests.’ Then he tells them the story that really becomes the kernel of the “Acres of Diamonds” speech.

The essence of the “Acres of Diamonds”, when you hear that title, what does it mean to you? Acres of diamonds, you can just imagine a field glittering with diamonds. Thousands and thousands of diamonds spread along a field like fruit in a harvest. It’s quite a visual image. If you’ve heard the story, what does it mean to you? I’ll tell you the story in just a moment, but those of you who have heard the story, remember what the story was about? It’s about an old Persian farmer called Ali Hafed, who owned a very large farm. He had orchards, grain fields, and gardens. He had money and interest. He was wealthy and contented. Then he’s visited one day by one of these ancient Buddhist priests, this is the way it’s written, one of the wise men of the East. He sat down by the fire and told the old farmer how this world of ours was made. He talks about how diamonds were some of the things that were created in the world and when he was finished talking about these amazing diamonds he says, ‘a diamond is a congealed drop of sunlight’. Ali Hafed heard about all these diamonds, about how much they were worth and he went to his bed that night a poor man. I thought that was a very brilliant statement. He was a very wealthy man with fields, farms, a family, houses, and animals. Yet when he heard about diamonds, he went to bed a poor man. Why a poor man? Because he was comparing what he had with the wealth that exists in diamonds and he felt poor. He didn’t have a diamond. So all the things he did possess felt less valuable. This is something that all of us have to be really careful about. When we see somebody else’s wealth, sometimes we feel poor. When we feel poor we have a poverty mindset because we’re comparing our wealth to other people’s wealth. When we drive along the freeway sometimes we’ll see a car that we would like to own. We look at own bank statements and say, ‘well I don’t know how they got that car, who they were, or where they got it’. We look at the car that we’re driving and we go, ‘hm, not good enough.’ Yet, if other people around the world say, eighty percent of the people on the face of the Earth can’t afford the junker we’re driving. When they compare their autorickshaw or their bare feet to the car that we’re driving, they themselves feel poor compared to us. So it’s always relative. What you have will be a luxurious compared to eighty percent of the people on the face of the Earth; a third of the people on the face of the Earth earn less than two dollars a day. That means two billion people, a staggering number of people, are so far below our level of our standard of living that it’s almost laughable. We’ve got to be careful that what happened to Ali Hafed doesn’t happen to us. We are so staggeringly wealthy compared to most of the people on the face of this Earth. As a matter of fact, one book I read estimated that there have been over a hundred billion people who have lived and seen a sunrise on this Earth; a hundred billion people. There are approximately seven billion people on the Earth right now, but the ninety-three billion people who have lived before us, compared to our standard of living, these other ninety-three billion predominantly, never could have even imagined the stunning, staggeringly, amazingly, incredibly, wonderfully, unbelievably, powerful way that we live. Just to have a cell phone is mind boggling to these other ninety-three billion people who used to be on this planet. Comparatively, our wealth is unbelievable. We’ve just got to be so grateful for everything we already possess. As little as it might be compared to what our dreams are, or what our plans for the future are, or what other people around us might already possess; we can go to bed like Ali Hafed, a poor man, or a poor woman.

As the book says, “He had not lost anything, but he was poor because he was discontented. Discontented because he feared he was poor. He said, ‘I want a mine of diamonds!’ and he lay awake all night.” Being discontented is okay, in fact some of the great minds are. Edison, for instance, said that one of the secrets of success is to have a discontented mind; to always be unsatisfied and always want to make something better happen. That’s part of the secret of success but most people don’t take stock of what they already possess and what they already own. They don’t always make sure that they are always ‘wealthy’ is their mind set. You have to always feel wealthy but discontented; successful but dissatisfied. Be happy with what you already possess but willing to push yourself to acquire more so that you can have the greater possibility of serving more and more people; being a greater source of help for more people. So, as the story goes, Ali Hafed sells his farm, collected his money, and left his family in charge of a neighbor and away he went in search of diamonds. He began his search, very properly to my mind, at the mountains of the moon. Afterward, he came around into Palestine then wandered on into Europe. At last, when his money was all spent and he was in rags, wretchedness, and poverty, he stood on the shore of a bay in Barcelona, Spain when a great tidal wave came rolling between the pillars of Hercules and the poor, afflicted, suffering, dying man could not resist the awful temptation to cast himself into that incoming tide. He sank beneath its foaming crest never to rise in this life again. When that old guide had told me that awful, sad, story he stopped the camel I was riding on and went back to fix the baggage that was coming off another camel and I had an opportunity to muse over this story while he was gone. I remember saying to myself, and this of course is Russell H. Conwell writing now. Why did he reserve that story for his particular friends? There seemed to be no beginning, no middle, no end, and nothing to it! That was the first story I had ever told in my life and would be the first one I would ever read in which the hero was killed in the first chapter! I had but one chapter of that story and the hero was dead. Then he now adds the exclamation point to the story because the man who purchased Ali Hafed’s farm one day led his camel into the garden to drink and as that camel put its nose into the shallow of that garden brook, Ali Hafed’s successor noticed a curious flash of light from the white sands of the stream. He pulled out a black stone having an eye of light reflecting all the hues of the rainbow, he took the pebble into the house and put it on the mantel which covers the central fires and forgot all about it. A few days later, the same old, priest, came into visit Ali Hafed’s successor – the person who bought Ali Hafed’s farm – and that moment he opened that door he saw that flash of light on the mantel. He rushed up to it and shouted, “Here is a diamond! Has Ali Hafed returned?” “Oh no, Ali Hafed has not returned and that is not a diamond. That is nothing but a stone we found right out here in our own garden.” “But,” said the priest, “I tell you, I know a diamond when I see it and I know positively that this is a diamond.” Together they rushed out into the old garden and stirred up the white sands with their fingers and lo! There came up more beautiful and valuable gems. “Thus!” said the guide to me and my friends, “It is historically true, was discovered the diamond mine of Golconda. The most magnificent diamond mine in all the history of mankind, excelling the Kimberly itself; the Coroner, the Orloff of the crown jewels of England and Russia, the largest on Earth came from that mine.”

When that old, Arab guide told me the second chapter of his story he then took off his Turkish cap and swung it around in the air again to get my attention to the moral. Had Ali Hafed remained at home, and dug in his own cellar, underneath his own wheat fields, or in his own garden instead of wretchedness, starvation, and death by suicide in a strange land, he would have had acres of diamonds. For every acre of that old farm, yes, every shovel full afterward, revealed gems which since have decorated the crowns of monarchs. Then, using that as the kernel of his speech, Russell H. Conwell delivered a powerful message over six thousand times, travelling all around the world to deliver that message, and bringing the money from his speaking fees back to Philadelphia where he got the brilliant idea to start the Temple University which today is a very large university with thousands and thousands of students. He also said that he himself had put, through that university with the money from that, over sixteen-hundred people that he gave scholarships to who went through the university that he founded. Then he goes on to tell other, similar stories. He tells the story of Kernel Sander’s farm in California, which was the beginning of the great California gold rush. Somebody owned Kernel Sander’s farm before Kernel Sander. Did they know that they were sleeping on acres of gold? Or that there was gold everywhere from that one spot? Or that beneath them were millions upon millions of dollars’ worth of gold just waiting to be sifted out of the stream? Then he also tells the story of the all the unbelievable oil finds in Pennsylvania. Somebody was the owner of the land. He says an old farmer, who wanted to learn about oil and studied it like crazy, had a friend of his who was doing some oil mining up in Canada. He sold his farm, according to Russell H. Conwell, according to the county record for eight-hundred and thirty-three dollars. He had scarcely gone from that place to visit with his cousin in Canada. He already left there. He had scarcely gone from that place, the farm that he sold so he could take the money to move to Canada to try to discover oil before the man who purchased the spot when out to arrange from the watering of the cattle. He found the previous owner had gone out years before – this is the guy who sold that farm, had put a plank across the brook at the back of the barn, edgewise, into the surface of the water; just a few inches. The purpose of that plank at that sharp angle across the brook was to throw over to the other bank a dreadful looking scum through which the cattle would not put their noses. With that plank there to throw it all over to one side, the cattle would drink below. Thus, that man who had gone to Canada, had been, himself, damming back, for twenty-three years, a flood of coal oil which the state geologists of Pennsylvania declared to us ten years later, was even then worth a hundred million dollars to our state. Four years ago our geologists declared the discovery to be worth, to our state, a thousand million dollars; which is a billion dollars. The man who owned that territory, on which the city of Titusville now stands, and those Pleasantville valleys, had studied the subject from the second day of God’s creation clear down the present time. He studied it until he knew all about and yet he is said to have sold the whole of his farm for eight-hundred and thirty-three dollars. So with these three big stories, the discovery of gold in California, oil in Pennsylvania, and the diamond mine in the Far East. He now launches to basically say that Pennsylvania, as a matter of fact, Philadelphia, where he was delivering the speech is where acres of diamonds can be found.

He talks about the entrepreneurial spirit and how every one of us can take acres of diamonds in our own lives and we can create fortunes from them. He talks about somebody who discovers little ideas, the safety pin, and he uses that to show that you don’t have to have a lot of money to start your businesses; you just need to have a great idea. You start from where you are with what you have and you go on to create a fortune for yourself. He talks about, since he’s a Baptist Minister, why should you create a future? Supposedly you are not supposed to make money in this world because if you’re a spiritual believer, money is the root of all evil. He goes into the story here to say money isn’t the root of all evil; the love of money is the root of all evil. He said that it’s your divine right, basically as enlightened entrepreneur, to discover the ideas that you have been given and to create a fortune for yourself while sharing that blessing with the rest of the world. It’s kind of like the first enlightened entrepreneur, the way I like to say it. That’s what his message was as a clergy man going around the country delivering speeches in packed houses all across America and around the world. Talking about the fact that it’s important to create wealth as long as you don’t let the wealth go to your head and make the world a better place. He finished it off, his book, with this final paragraph. “Oh, I learned the lesson then that I will never forget so long as the tong of the bell of time continues to swing for me. Greatness consists not in the holding of some future office but really consists in doing great deeds with little means and the accomplishment of vast purposes from the private ranks of life. To be great at all one must be great here, now, in Philadelphia.” – or whatever city he was speaking in. “He who can give to this city; better streets, better sidewalks, better schools, more colleges, more happiness, more civilization, and more of God, then he will be great anywhere. Let every man or woman here, if you never hear me again, remember this, that if you wish to be great at all you must begin where you are and what you are, in Philadelphia now. He that can give to this city any blessing, he who can be a good citizen while he lives here, he that can make better homes, he that can be a blessing whether he works in the shop, sits behind the counter, or keeps house; whatever be his life. He who would be great anyway must first be great in his own Philadelphia or in his own life wherever your life is.” So starting with that kernel, a thought, what are your acres of diamonds? Where you are, the city where you live right now, the place where you reside; what are your acres of diamonds? When it came to the books that I have written I think the acres of diamonds reside inside you, not in your city, house, or the fields of farms that you possess, but already reside inside you. So what are the resources that you possess, that you can literally turn into a fortune? What are the things that are inside you right now that you can use to create wealth? What is your wealth? I’ve often said about my trip to San Francisco, take away my wallet, give me a hundred dollar bill and in seventy-two hours I’ll buy an extra piece of real-estate using none of my own money. I was trying to prove that you can go into any city, they can take away your wallet, and they can leave you with your real wealth. Your real wealth is what’s already inside you. They take away the four things that the banker is always looking for before he or she will make you a loan. The banker is looking for your cash, your credit, your cash flow, or your collateral; the things you own.

With those things on your financial statement, if you’ve got some cash in the bank for your down payment, you’ve got cash flow from a job that’s stable enough they can determine that you can continue to make the monthly payment on that mortgage. They also look at if there are enough assets that you possess. Or if your credit rating is good so you’ve proven that you can keep your word when it comes to money. Then the bank will lend you money! However, what if you go into a city and take away from you all of those four things bankers see – cash, credit, cash flow, collateral – and they leave you with none of that, is it possible to create a fortune with nothing? That was the whole premise behind “Nothing Down”, that was the challenge that I did for that book to prove that you could drop me in any city and start me with nothing and you can create a fortune right from where you are. A matter of fact, your fortune goes with you wherever you are, whatever city you happen to be in, or whatever country you move to, you take with you your, what I call, Enlightened Wealth Statement. As a matter of fact in “Cracking the Millionaire Code”, there’s a statement in there about your hidden assets, your Enlightened Wealth Statements on page number sixty-two. Your Enlightened Wealth Statement compared to your financial statement that the banker wants to look at, the traditional financial statement that lists your assets and your liabilities. Your assets are your things that you own and liabilities are the amounts that you owe. There’s a financial statement there on page fifty-nine of “Cracking the Millionaire Code”. All of us have filled out a form like that showing your assets, cash, credit, collateral, etc. However, your Enlightened Wealth Statement contains your hidden assets, it’s your life! Just having a life! To breath; what’s that worth? I can tell there are ninety-three billion people who would love to trade places with you right now. Your life is priceless. It’s amazing how many people de-value just the very life they live; the very fact you can look around. Our last conversation on Breakfast With Bob was with Jim Stovall, if you were there with us last week this blind man told us about how valuable his life became at twenty-nine years old when he lost his eyesight. He lost that asset that most of us take for granted and became a multi-millionaire by solving his problem; the blind problem. In other words, it was his problem that was his greatest source of wealth. Most people when they look at their life they don’t think about their problems being assets but these hidden assets can be turned into fortunes. He can’t see, but he can bless the lives of sixty-million blind people and make for himself a fortune for him and his family and have movies produced that he can’t even see himself! However, he’s created the technology so that blind people can watch his own movie, starring James Garner and Abigail Breslin who was nominated for an academy award not for that movie but these are great actors and actresses. The rest of us can see the movie, “The Ultimate Gift”, but these sixty-million blind people in American can now ‘watch’ the movie by listening to a narrator describe what is going on in the movie as they hear the voices of the actors. So his Enlightened Wealth Statement, including the hidden assets and liabilities, made him a fortune. In other words, everything you possess in your life is a source of wealth, even the things that you have misperceived as being problems. It’s very hard isn’t it? When the problems are happening, at least as we are perceiving them, it’s extremely hard in the middle of the problems when we become accustomed to these expectations of the way life is supposed to be, or the way we want it to be we kind of settle into these patterns and we get into familiar spaces, we kind of settle. We settle into our comfort zones.

Everything you’ve ever wanted is just a foot outside your comfort zone. Fortunately, life is a changing comfort zone. It constantly shifts. The light of your comfort zone sometimes shrinks and the world outside, the edge of your comfort zone looks more and more dangerous. That’s what is happening to our economy right now. You have a certain comfort zone, money you’ve been earning and bringing in the door, and as this storm is raging outside your comfort zone, the comfort zone shrinks so our dreams shrink. We’re nervous about what is taking place out there and we kind of hide and we huddle and we wait until the storm is going to blow over but who knows? This storm may not blow over. It may take decades; it has for Japan. Japan was going through high times until 1990, approximately, and then they were the second richest country on the face of the Earth; Japan! This little, tiny country! They had lots of fortunes and then things went upside down. Their stock market crash and it’s been twenty years. Now we’ve got this huge tsunami that just ripped apart that country. Yet, I can tell you, there are people in Japan who, although for many their comfort zone has shrank, that are creating fortunes! I was just in Japan three weeks ago with the top leaders of a network marketing company that I’m involved in and they flew me in as a secret to speak to the top Japanese leaders. There are people who have just gone through a horrendous tsunami and their economy is still struggling after twenty years of struggle. Here were bright, sharp, smart, young, happy, focused, dedicated, and very wealthy people who are creating fortunes from whatever position they find themselves in. They’re using the challenges of their life to make fortunes flow into their lives. They’re using their hidden assets, their life, their spiritual beliefs, their destiny, their skills, their life experience, their bodies, sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, their citizenship, their intuition, their sense of peace, their talents, their values, and their passions. This is where your wealth is. These are your acres of diamonds; your friends, your family, your health, your character, your courage, your persistence, your creativity, and your joy. Talking about liabilities, we have liabilities just like the traditional financial statement. You have debts, credit card debt or personal loans, car loans, mortgages, or unsecured debts, installment loans, unpaid taxes and business loans, or whatever other liabilities. We have banker kind of liabilities but we also have spiritual liabilities. Our Enlightened Wealth Statement is impoverished when we have disorganization and lower self-esteem, bad habits, addictions, blind spot, fears, anxieties, poor health, enemies, bad relationships, internal critical voice, laziness, there are liabilities that cause our hidden assets to be further hidden. I think the greatest liability is lack of gratitude. I used to teach training. We would do wealth retreats and during my speech I would have everybody break into teams and have them write down as a group and brainstorm a list of a hundred assets that they already possessed; assets that they were the owner of right now. I would ask the audience before they left, on this exercise I would ask them, “how many of you are millionaires?” and only a handful of people would raise their hands; kind of nervously at that. I would say, “I’m going to ask you that one more time, how many of you have two lungs?” Everyone raised their hand. I said, “How much are your lungs worth?” I mean if, a billionaire somewhere in the world needed a lung, would you sell one of your lungs for a million dollars? It’s not legal to do that in this country, but maybe there’s a country where it would be legal.

Would you fly to that country and go into the hospital and let them remove a lobe of the lung for a million dollars? Most people wouldn’t, but I said, “Well just because you won’t sell it doesn’t mean it’s not worth a million dollars.” You probably would give that same lobe of your lung to someone who needs it without thinking about asking for any money for it. You’d give it away but you just wouldn’t sell it. I have a friend of mine who has a daughter who has cystic fibrosis and her lung function is now less than fifty percent on her remaining lung. The other lung had collapsed and is dead. She now lives as a mother, having given birth to a baby, being married in her thirties now and her life was expected to last to her early twenties; now she’s thirty-three I think. She now is down to less than fifty percent function on one remaining lung. Who’s going to give the lung transplant? Her aunts, uncles, and even friends are coming forward and saying, “If she needs one of my lungs, or at least a lobe of my lung, I’m in. Let’s see if we’re compatible.” In other words, we have assets that are extremely valuable. Two eyes, two ears… although Jim Stovall last week didn’t have his eyes; we do! However, most of us don’t take those assets seriously. We discount them; how much is your taste worth? What talents do you possess? Do you already possess them? So when we send these groups out into the hall to brainstorm a list of a hundred assets that people already possessed, that were worth at least a million dollars each, when people came back in the room they had a written list of a hundred assets that were worth at least a million which they possessed internally. From relationships to their body parts to the talents and gifts… it was a very mindboggling experience for most people to realize that they are already worth a hundred-million dollars. Most people go through their life assuming that they’re poor. How could you be poor if you’re worth a hundred-million? Well maybes it’s because you have a lot of assets but you just don’t have enough cash flow. We have a lot of assets. We have a lot of equity; enormous equity. You need to learn how to turn that equity into cash flow. So that’s what the “Acres of Diamonds” book is about. First you have to discover what your equity is, what your value is, where the diamonds are hidden in your own life. Then, rather than leaving those diamonds on the mantel above your fireplace, you take those diamonds, polish them, and market them to people who love to wear diamonds. The diamonds that you were destined to polish and provide through your diamond store to the world. You’re in the diamond business, or the gold business, or the oil business; you have assets that you possess. So how do you turn those assets into fortunes?

Back to chapter eleven and twelve of, “Cash in a Flash”, the title of the chapter is, “Your Fastest Path to Profit: Make Money From What You Love.” So the first goal is to become aware of your inner winner; to discover your own unique path to prosperity. It begins with the passions, talents, and gifts you already possess. You are already a winner inside at something. What are you a winner of? Are you aware of it yet? There are hints all around you. What do you love to do? What are you good at? What’s important to you? What feels right to you? What kind of people, ideas, or things are you drawn to? What fascinates you? What interests you? What kind of magazines, books, and movies attract you? What things do you cherish? You see, if you cherish those things, if you bought some of those things with your credit cards or your cash sometime in your life and you acquired something that you cherish. You put it on your mantel in your home, you’re happy to have it, and it makes you smile.

Well how many people in the world are just like you who cherish that very same thing? By just looking around your house where you live and the things you’ve acquired. All of those are hints to let you know that those are the things that you’ve acquired and obviously there has got to be ten thousand other people on this planet who would like to acquire similar kinds of things. Now you have a hint like, “maybe I could be a person who markets those kinds of things to other people!” because entrepreneurs make money by marketing products, services, or ideas; information. This book, “Cash in a Flash”, really focusing in, mostly, on being an entrepreneur of ideas. When you’re selling your ideas, thoughts, skills, knowledge, or systems, how you digitize the things you already possess; that’s, in my opinion, the fastest path to cash. Therefore, when you discover the hobbies that you have which can be digitized to people who have the same hobbies, where do you spend time or money? What are your talents? What are your gifts? When you discover, I call it purpose, the things you love to do and you create a business around it, it just makes life much better. The work world drops away immediately. You will never work another day in your life when you discover what it is you love to do and you can create a business around it. You’ll even get up early in the morning to be on a Breakfast With Bob call, like I do, to talk to people. You’ll just love to share your special thing, your song, the song that you sing; I call that your song. You’ll want to sing your song for the rest of your life. When you discover your ‘why’ it makes sense of everything that went before and everything that goes after. You’ll that the right things, as they come from the future toward your present, they just feel right. You just feel like you’ve discovered your path. Some people reading these words right now are nodding. Or if you’re hearing these words you’re going, ‘Yup! I figured it out, I got it.’ They know exactly what I’m talking about. However, there are other people saying, ‘What’s this guy talking about? Who is this guy? What is he saying?’ Sometimes you get overwhelmed with responsibilities and you just say, ‘Life is tough, I’m going to do what I hate to do at a job I don’t enjoy because jobs are scarce. I’ve got to put food on the table. I’ve got responsibilities.’ Yes, we all do but if the opportunity opens itself up to follow your purpose path, although it may take years to finally figure out where the vein of gold really is, it might take years to figure out how to monetize that so that you turn your equity into cash flow but that’s the goal. The goal is to turn your equity into cash flow eventually, somehow. Sooner or later we hope you’ll find that for yourself. You’re worth finding that in yourself. You’re magnificent just the way you are, just who you are right now, a hundred-million worth right now. Touch yourself at your heart level and say, ‘I’m worth a hundred-million.’ Take a deep breath on that and just feel it. Just having the opportunity to take that breath you just took is worth a million dollars. No one will pay you for that breath you just took, or will they? The fact that you are breathing means that you are alive and available to make the world a better place. Somebody is going to pay you a million dollars. So you ask yourself the question, ‘Who would that person be?’ Well maybe they won’t pay you a million in a lump sum, are there ten people that will pay you a hundred-thousand? Can you create enough value so that ten people on this Earth would say, ‘Yeah, I’ll pay you a hundred-thousand bucks for what you know.’ The answer is, how you can create enough value in your life where somebody would even consider writing you a hundred-thousand dollar cheque.

That means you have to make the diamonds in your life so valuable, so polished, so beautiful, so available, so presentable to somebody that they want to have you be their mentor, their guide, their coach, their advisor, or their consultant. At least a hundred people should write a ten thousand dollar cheque. Aren’t there a hundred people in the world that will write a ten thousand dollar cheque? For what! That’s the purpose of this call: for what? For some kind of knowledge, skill, ability, talent, gift which you already possess but maybe haven’t yet polished or made it presentable enough or marketed yourself well enough. Aren’t there a hundred people in the world who could learn something from you that would be worth ten thousand dollars? Well, that’s a million! Well maybe if you’re not worth ten thousand to somebody, maybe you’re worth a thousand to somebody. Where they would take a weekend out of their life and let you teach them a little seminar in your own home, for instance, and there’s a few people who’d like to write you an a thousand dollar cheque for what you already know; how to organize a closet, for instance or how to put on your makeup. How to do anything! Aren’t there ten thousand people in the world who would write you an a hundred dollar cheque for something you know how to do? Well sure. Don’t you know something that somebody would write an a hundred dollar cheque for a little system you created which you could digitize and put online then somebody would write an a hundred dollar cheque for it? Give you an a hundred dollar Paypal contribution? Well yeah, sure! That’s a million. Well aren’t there a hundred thousand who would give you a ten dollar cheque for a book you put together, an E-book maybe? You see, you already possess enough knowledge, skill, and value. All you need at this point is how do you bridge the gap between what you know and how you market what you know. How do you discover the way to market yourself, to monetize yourself? That’s what I call, ‘infopreneuring’, an information entrepreneur. So you go into one of my books, “Multiple Streams of Income” and there’s a whole chapter on that. It’s one of my favorite chapters and as a matter of fact, it’s a chapter that I wrote eleven years ago but I’ve been talking about it for almost twenty years. Chapter number thirteen. Yes, your eighth stream. Out of the ten streams of income I talk about in, “Multiple Streams of Income”, your eighth stream, infopreneuring, how to turn a tiny, classified ad into a fortune. At this moment you are one classified ad away from a fortune. It’s one E-mail away from a fortune basically! There’s a whole chapter on it from page 209 to page 240. There are thirty-one pages. How you get paid for every word you write, how you create an info-funnel. I’m going to be doing a tele-conference on this by the way. It’s going to come up in June, I’ve pushed it off, I was going to do it on the twenty-fifth of May, but it’s some time beginning in June. I’m going to do a ninety minute, detailed tele-conference on exactly how you turn your ideas into a fortune. I’ll announce it and let people know about but if you want to participate in that tele-conference just get ready. You’re going to love it. It’s going to turn the concept we’ve been talking about right here, which is “Acres of Diamonds”, how do you turn your acres of diamonds into acres of cash flow? I will be letting those who have already gone to robertallen.com and signed up for the newsletter I have there; that’s how I’ll let you know so if you haven’t signed up for that go to robertallen.com and get on that little list because I’ll be letting the folks know there when I’m going to do this tele-conference.

It’s one of the few times I really do live, in depth, nitty gritty tele-conferences like this. I’ve just decided recently this is what I want to do. I really want to focus a lot more on information marketing and teaching you how to do that. In the, “Cash in a Flash” book I then take the mind and the heart, which is where your assets really reside, I call it: this is your cache flow. The flowing from the cache, which is your resources, your asset base of resources, cache flow is getting those assets that you already possess to flow wealth into your life. You’re cache flow. What is your cache of cash? The word cache is a dictionary word that describes a hidden storage space for money, provisions, or weapons; a secret storage place for our valuables or money. You have a secret cache of valuable resources already inside you waiting to be monetized. What if we were to scan your brain and your heart to determine which assets are most cashable? What would we discover about you? If I were to give a cache scan and we put on these imaginary spectacles similar to a CT scan or a CAT scan, and we put on your cache scan glasses. What would we discover about your hidden, secret assets? If I were to walk into your house, sit down in your living room, and spend an hour interviewing you, at the end of the hour we would come up with ten, multimillion dollar ideas that you already possess. In other words, I’ve done this a lot so I just have this sixth sense of helping people discover what their cache scan reveals; what their secret source of cash is. If you put on the lenses that I wear, each lens identifies the valuable assets that can be converted into fast cash. The left lens, I call it the mind lens, deals with the assets that are in your mind. The right lens deals with assets that are in your heart. Therefore, when I look at somebody I’m looking at their mind and their heart. I don’t have glasses that I look through but this is the way I see the world. I ask them questions and they revolve around the central core of who that person really is. There are questions I ask about their mind and questions I ask about their heart. Your mind concepts are things that are about your knowledge, things that are already in your mind. You already know them! Skills are things that you know how to do, things that you’ve had success in; that is cashable! If you’ve been successful at something, somebody in the world would like to know what that success is and would like you to coach them on how to succeed at the very thing you’ve already succeeded at. You also have failures and fears; how can you turn your failures and fears into money? Well, let’s look at Jim Stovall. Did he have a failure of his eyesight? Yes, his eyesight failed him. Did he turn that into a fortune? Yes. Every problem you possess has a fortune hidden inside it; challenges; things that you’ve been challenged by. These are your mind assets. Your heart assets are the things that you love to do, the things you find are passionate about, your desires, your passions, talents, wisdom; what is wisdom? It’s your ability to learn from the experiences of your life. Once you’ve learned from something, good or bad that happened to you – apparently good or bad, once you’ve learned from that your wisdom grows and now you’ve earned the right to be a coach and guide to somebody who is going through the same types of challenges. Your wisdom; how much is your wisdom worth? ‘I don’t see myself as being all that wise.’ Well, have you ever given advice to somebody based upon your past experience? Sure, everybody has. Every child is given wisdom, by everyone of us who has ever gone through childhood or teenage hood. You’re connections, people you know! Each of us knows a hundred people. How much is that worth?

Each of us knows a hundred successful people, I call that your winners circle. You know a hundred people who have succeeded at something; they are winners. Well what is the connection to those winners, what is that trust you have between you and your winners circle, worth? If that’s not worth a million you’re just not monetizing it properly. In other words, you utilize your relationships in ethical ways so that your relationships, people you know, are happy to share with you their successes in a way that both of you can win. You could help people around you turn what’s inside their hearts and minds into fortunes too. When I think of the book, “Acres of Diamonds”, I don’t think of territory, land, real-estate, where these acres of diamonds are found; I think of the real-estate that’s inside you. You are prime real-estate. Every centimeter on your body is worth a fortune. You are prime real-estate. When you look at the world, when you walk through the world stand a little taller today, will you? Take deeper breaths and today, just today, write down a hundred things you’re grateful for that are worth fortunes to you. This week, take a whole week to do it. At the end of this week I challenge you to write down a hundred things you possess, a hundred things you know how to do, a hundred skills you already know, a hundred successes you’ve had, a hundred fears or failures, challenges, dreams, passions, talents, gifts, wisdom, connections… write the whole list down! Keep a list right next to your regular seat in the car when you’re driving around or in your planner, wherever, put in on the refrigerator. At the end of this week you’ll have your cache of cash right there staring you in the face; a fortune to be had, to be monetized. That’s my challenge to you, that’s my prayer for you, that’s my hope for you, my desire for you, my plan for you; to monetize these unbelievable gifts, this hidden source of wealth. Reveal it to yourself and have a wonderful day, my best to you. I’ll see you again next week on Breakfast With Bob.