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 If you complete the steps in the next lesson, you'll have a good idea.
+====== In Conversation with Mark #1: Is It Possible to Find Your Passion and Turn It into A Business?  ======
+Dear Reader,
+In this new series called 'In Conversation With Mark', we bring to you excerpts from the James Altucher show where Mark Ford gets candid about his journey and throws light on the incidents and decisions that shaped his path to wealth.
+Since you are following Mark's life and business decisions closely, we believe you would like this series that unveils the many untold facts from the man himself.
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+James Altucher:
+So, Mark. Mark Ford, thanks so much for joining me on The James Altucher Show.
+Mark Ford:
+Thank you for inviting me, I gotta tell you, like I told you before, as far as I'm concerned, you're a celebrity, I'm a big fan of yours, and I'm thrilled to be here in Delray Beach.
+James Altucher:
+No, I think people have to know what you've done. How many businesses have you either started or been involved in?
+Mark Ford:
+I don't know, but certainly, it's in the hundreds.
+James Altucher:
+In the hundreds, okay. Okay, so the average, let's say investor, expects an 85% failure rate. What do you think your failure rate is in all these businesses?
+Mark Ford:
+You know what, it's hard to tell.
+James Altucher:
+I know that you were an investor, because you started tons of these businesses.
+Mark Ford:
+Right. There are two prongs in answering your question. One is that I'm 64 years old, so it'll all be in retrospect. And you know in retrospect the vision gets cleaned up as you go. The other's that I'm Irish. So, my feeling is that 85% of them are correct, but the truth is I have no idea. I'll say this, I'm definitely not one of these people that have failed, and failed, and failed, and then finally made it. I never wanted to be that way. I've always been extremely cautious as an investor of my time, and my resources, and my money. So, my failures -
+James Altucher:
+I like how you put that, by the way - time, resources, money - money last. Time is the most valuable.
+Mark Ford:
+Absolutely, absolutely. Though, because of that - and of course, it took long time to learn - I would say that it doesn't feel like I've had a lot of failures. But where my failures have been are generally in areas that I knew practically nothing about. For example, investing - when my career was basically the career of starting as employee and turning into an intrapreneur, and then turning into an entrepreneur. And along the way, as I was making money - I was accumulating money - I didn't know what to do with it, so I would invest it according to whatever half-baked notion passed my way. And I did a pretty good job of losing a lot of that money. And I do talk about that.
+James Altucher:
+Welcome to the club.
+Mark Ford:
+Right. But I would say that generally, I think the general idea that to make more money you have to take risk is wrong. I feel the opposite. I feel that the way to make money, to give yourself the highest percentage of chance of making money, is to avoid risky things and to do things that are more like sure bets. I guess I'm the career equivalent of the parent that says, 'Forget about being an NBA player, forget about being a rock star. You can be a doctor or a lawyer, or maybe a plumber, and just stick with that.'
+James Altucher:
+But you haven't stuck with one thing. I mean yes, you started businesses, but they've been businesses in every category. And you say, for instance, you're not good at investing, and yet you've even started businesses obviously in the publishing industry about investing.
+Mark Ford:
+Right.
+James Altucher:
+So you've been able to take this skillset of starting businesses and apply it to any area, which is opposite you know, many people are told, 'Find your passion first, and then start a business.' What do you think of that concept?
+Mark Ford:
+Well, you know, I thought both ways about it. I think it's possible to find your passion, turn it into a business, and have a happy life. But generally, I think if you turn your passion into a business, you're going to lose your passion. And so I think that there were things that we call 'vocations' and 'avocations'.
+And to me, the avocation is the thing that you love and you're going to preserve, your pristine - because the truth is, whatever we're in love with in terms of a career, we're in love with it because we know practically nothing about it. Being an astronaut, or being a doctor, or being a missionary - and when you actually end up being a missionary and you're riddled with mosquito bites and you're trying to help people, and they're ignoring you and they're just asking for more money, and you say to yourself, 'Geez I wish I'd known about this when I thought it was so wonderful.'
+So, I think that for me, there are parts of my life that I've kept as avocations - I've never wanted to make a business out of. And you know what I really did is, I accidentally got into the business I got into. I wanted to be a writer; I started off as a writer, I was working for a small newsletter publishing company in Washington, D.C. writing about Africa. Well I wanted to write about African culture, but the job turned out to be a job writing about African commerce. And I knew so little about commerce. I mean, I had a master's degree at this time. It was called African Business and Trade, and I remember thinking, 'What is the difference between business and trade? In fact, what is trade?'
+James Altucher:
+What's business?
+Mark Ford:
+I kind of knew the concept of business but, I literally didn't know what 'trade' meant. And forget about countertrade, barter, and all the other things I had to deal with. So I ended up being in that business and in three years I figured out how to become the publisher of that you know - the top guy in a very small business.
+James Altucher:
+Is that what you mean by “intrapreneur”? You used that word earlier.
+Mark Ford:
+Yes, I would say you become either the most valuable - or one of the most valuable - and you get a compensation deal where it's tied to the sales or profits that you create. But rather than being the sole boss and owning the business entirely - having that satisfaction - you attach yourself to a larger group that maybe has a lot more potential than you. And that's the way I always felt, 'cause there were so many things I didn't know how to do, like make money. And I'd rather have 10% of a big piece than 100% of a very little piece.
+James Altucher:
+I think that's an important concept that a lot of people forget. They think they're either going to be in a cubicle, or they're going to be an entrepreneur. And somehow some consider being an entrepreneur some magical thing, and being in a cubicle some hateful thing. But there's this middle place where - as you call 'intrapreneur' - where you can figure out how your success within an organization can tie itself to your success.
+Mark Ford:
+Right. And I had noticed as devout reader of your stuff that one of your most popular essays is Quit Your Job or How To Quit Your Job and Do What You Love/ But I have noticed lately that you've been mentioning that it's possible within some kind of business environment where you're not the owner to become wealthy and have a good life.
+And I think that that's true for me. If you go work for IBM or Merrill Lynch it's probably not going to happen because those companies are so big and so structured, that the way to become successful there is to just do what you're told and move through the ranks. But if you work for a smaller company like Agora - after Washington, D.C. I went down to Florida and decided whether to be a journalist.
+So I decided to take a journalist - I was looking for jobs as a journalist. I decided to take three interviews in Florida, 'cause I thought I would get a tax deduction. I was trying to be clever. And I took the three interviews assuming I'd be getting none of them, 'cause in D.C. there were no jobs at the time. And I got all three.
+I took a Dale Carnegie course and I realized that my big problem in life was that I had too many goals, you know? One, common problem is people don't have goals, and then they say, 'You don't write them down, you don't do this, you don't do that,' which I think is true for many people. But I had a lot of goals. And I was trying to follow them all at the same time.
+And I remember we came to that chapter and it said, 'If you have this problem, you're going to have trouble with this exercise.' The exercise was to eliminate the - write down your top ten, narrow it to three, and then go in. The Dale Carnegie program that I took was 14 weeks and every week you'd read a chapter and then you'd go and you'd stand in front of this audience, and you would tell them what you're gonna do - you make a little speech and if they liked you, you got a pencil. I don't know if you've ever experienced this.
+It sounds pretty corny, but this really changed my life. I got down to three - teacher, writer, and millionaire, you know, rich guy. And I could not decide. I was frantic. I was sweating driving there, my heart was pounding - because I felt that if I chose one, somehow, subconsciously I knew that it would change me, and I felt like I was giving up the others. And so as I was walking up to the podium, I had this thought, 'I need to just make the money, because if it turns out not to be what you think it is, then you just give it away.'
+I said I was gonna do that. And that changed me. I mean, overnight, it changed me. Everything got clear.
+James Altucher:
+Did you have to pick one?
+Mark Ford:
+I had to pick one.
+James Altucher:
+Okay. So you had to write down ten, you had to narrow it down to three, and then that night you had to pick one.
+Mark Ford:
+And for the rest of the course, which was another 12 weeks or so - 11 weeks - you had to focus on nothing but that in terms of your goals. Both when you went in and talked about things, and when you were in your daily work.
+James Altucher:
+So you had to kind of for the next 12 weeks or whatever, you had to kind of come up with ideas that would move you forward to being a millionaire?
+Mark Ford:
+Exactly.
+(Mark continues talking about 'intrapreneurship' in the next parts of the series, and reveals how to choose two things that you could do simultaneously. Stay tuned!)
+====== In Conversation With Mark #2: How To Get Out Of Your Cubicle ======
+Dear Reader,
+In the previous article of this series, Mark Ford explained the meaning of 'intrapreneurship' and why one should not merge your passion with business. In this part, Mark explains how you can become an 'intrapreneur', move up smartly in the organization, and grow as an individual.
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+James Altucher:
+You talk about this a lot in your books, particularly Ready, Fire, Aim, 'How can I (a) come up with the idea that will get me out of my cubicle and (b) how do I start marketing this?'
+I forget if you said it or someone else said it, but school kind of teaches you to get a job, when no one teaches you to get several multiple sources of income. And so, how can I start from step one? I'm in the cubicle, and I'm scared. I think I don't like my boss, and he's gonna fire me. I have kids to raise, and I have the alimony to pay. My mind is telling me I'm stuck. What's the first step?
+Mark Ford:
+Okay. There are two things you could do simultaneously that don't compete with each other.
+One is you have to figure out how to become the most valuable employee you possibly can be, and really the most valuable employee in your environment of your business, whatever that is - your department, your division, however far you feel you can contribute.
+The other thing is you have to decide whether your business is the business where an entrepreneur can thrive - many businesses are not. I have to say that becoming an entrepreneur will not work - as I said - if you work in a very corporate environment.
+If your business is political, it won't work. A political business is one where position and power are more important than creativity, and productivity, and profit. Profit is the purifying element of business.
+When everybody's thinking about making profit first, then politics - what you're allowed to do, what you're not allowed to do - takes second seat to coming up with good ideas. So you have to be in that environment. And if you're not in that environment, I think you have to move. You do have to quit your job.
+I always say - go work for a small business, that's growing.
+'A rising tide lifts all boats,' and we all have different capacities and our own internal boat, where boats of our brains or emotional intelligence have different sizes...but if you're in a company that itself is growing quickly, your chances of moving up the ladder are much, much greater. And your chances of getting a cross-departmental experience are much, much greater.
+I think it's very important to figure out whether your business is a business that would accept you if you were an entrepreneur that welcomes and lets people move up as fast.
+For example - if you are working for Procter & Gamble however, they're not going to change, so you have to change. You have to move, and go into a small, fast-growing business.
+But in the meantime, while you're waiting to get that better job, you should try to become the best employee you can.
+Every business has a base of three pieces. They have the sales and marketing side, they have the product production side, and then they have the management staff.
+What you need to do is understand - how does this or that work in your business? How does your business make money?
+How do products get produced, and reinvented, and reproduced? And find out where you are - you in that mechanism - are you part of that, and if you're not, can you shift over? Can you start volunteering to at least learn about those things?
+You know, it is a pretty strategic. You do have to promote yourself within a business, because if your business is at all big, there are plenty of people who want to take what you're doing, take credit for it, and put you in the closet. So, you have to know how to do that.
+James Altucher:
+That's interesting. My only real experience with big corporate America is that I worked for HBO - and you're right.
+There was a production side, they made TV shows. There was a sales and marketing side, how do we get more cus- tomers for HBO? And then there was the whole kind of accounting/IT side, it was for the management side. And I was on the management/IT side, so we were in another building, no one to talk to. And the way I would try to succeed in HBO was moving myself into the production side where I was obsessed.
+Mark Ford:
+The person that's really making the ultimate decisions about who makes money in business looks at their employees in terms of the ledger. On one side of the ledger are the expenses, and on one side are the production people who help make money.
+When you're an engineer, an IT guy, an accounting guy, even the legal guys - especially at Agora - you're on the expense side.
+Yeah. I may need them, but you're a cost. And I want to reduce that cost, and I want to increase who help make money.
+James Altucher:
+Okay so we're in the cubicle, this is a good example of him being an intrapreneur... But now, what if I also want to make that transition to entrepreneurship? Again, I'm in the cubicle and I'm scared because I've never done that before.
+Mark Ford:
+I wrote a whole book for that person called Reluctant Entrepreneur. I myself was never an entrepreneur, per se. I was an intrapreneur. I created businesses within businesses, and then while I had businesses, I was making more money than I needed, then I would invest in other businesses, and start other businesses, with my partner or other partners.
+My thing is, never leave your day job until the income from your side job is equal to your day job. Of the decisions I made after I decided to get wealthy was, I had this thought one day. I said, 'Wouldn't it be cool if every day I got just a little bit richer?'
+And that was one of the first things I said, 'I will do whatever it takes, even if it's just a nickel richer. I will get richer every day. I never want to get poorer.'
+And so I developed all these strategies, one of them was multiple incomes. You have to have multiple incomes. Another is, I kept a very minimum amount of money in volatile investments like stocks.
+My recommendation for people who want to get outside of that to their own is - to keep your day job, start by working extra hours. You do have those extra hours, and you can be better than 80% of the other employees working 25 hours smartly a week.
+====== The Time Management Bible ======
+Let's take a look back at the year so far.
+And make a promise for the future.
+Dear Reader,
+I received a heartfelt letter from one of my favourite Wealth Builders Club members, RKG. He had not written to me for some time so I was very happy to see his mail. However, I could see from his letter that he was struggling. This is what he asked of me...
+"Thanks for your relentless efforts and unperturbed way in which you carry out the task of sending us the mails twice a week. Whenever time permits I also read the Common Sense Living newsletters in addition to WBC mailers.
+Honestly, with office work and also at times personal work I am not able to find too much time for going through all the mails. I wonder what would happen to my dreams of doing something on my own. With an intent to not letting this (enrolling into WBC) become a failed attempt I had paid the annual membership renewal amount too. I hope I would be able to do better in terms of acting on the nice advices that WBC provides in the coming year.
+Anisa, I have a unique problem and I would like to ask you about it. I felt it better to ask a person who can look at it from a distance without any bias or prejudice and give me an independent view/response. So here is my problem...
+I have slowly become a slave of my bad habits especially when it comes to time management. To explain it better, let me quote a few examples. My work in IT services doesn't allow me to go home early in the evening, which eventually leads to late night dinner and late to bed. All this results in getting up late and this has become a vicious cycle.
+Throughout the day I keep thinking that I need to change my timings, go to bed early, get up early etc. but it doesn't happen. Day after day, month after month, this has been the case. However, please note that I am taking 3 meals a day with proper gaps, doing a bit of physical exercise late in the morning and getting adequate sleep. The only problem being the biological clock has shifted by nearly 2 hours when compared to others. My wife keeps asking me to join her for a morning walk and although I yearn a lot but unable to go with her.”
+- Wealth Builders Club member RKG
+RKG is asking for advice on how to manage time. He, like many of us, is struggling to live life to the fullest, to make the most of his time, to balance work, relationships, and health. To follow his dreams and follow-up on the life-changing ideas that Wealth Builders Club brings to each one of us.
+Many Wealth Builders Club members write to me about the success they are having, the new endeavours they have started, the way their financial situation and personal confidence is developing. But some of us are still struggling...
+You see, having access to a hoard of life-changing ideas makes us incredibly fortunate. But if ideas were rupees, we would all be millionaires. If ideas made us healthy, none of us would have bad backs and failing eyes. If ideas could bring success, who amongst us would be lacking?
+I'm asking you today to reflect on what you have done so far with your ideas. With all the ideas we have shared with you. Have you done all you can with your access to this amazing club of riches?
+Or have you not had the time?
+Today, I'm going to give RKG and all of you the most important thing that Mark Ford has ever shared with me. For me, it is a bible, one I refer to constantly, one that reminds me how precious my time is and what I am capable of achieving if I use it right.
+As Mark Ford puts it...
+If you can use your time more effectively than others use theirs, you will move ahead of them. It's all a matter of focusing your extra time and energy. This is a big secret, one that most people don't understand.
+Let's face it, life isn't fair. When it comes to money, beauty, intelligence, and talent, the distribution is uneven and arbitrary. But one thing we all have an equal amount of is time. We each have 24 hours a day. Even the length of life you get is not fair. But the 24 hours you have each day is the same for everyone. And what you do with those hours will determine your success and happiness.
+And to help you with your time management, with pursuing your goals, and with creating that wealth we are working to help you create everyday... I'm sending you Mark's time management guide.[report available in WBC Reports]
+Whatever stage of your wealth building journey you are in, I hope you take this chance to go back to the pledge you made when you joined us, reaffirm your pledge, and reassess your journey.

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