The Challenge - Unabridged
Let’s agree on a period of time - I’m thinking 3 months from your acceptance, during which we seek to generate income for the purpose of satisfying our own immediate, intermediate, and long-term goals. Yours will be different than mine because I’m looking for more income now and passive income for the future. You’ll probably focus more heavily on the passive income immediately since you’re not hurting for money right now.
Rules:
- Partner with anyone or noone, use resources you have already or those that you generate by borrowing, earning, etc. - the point of this exercise is to improve our position, financially (and maybe to write a book)*
- All activities must be reasonably (not necessarily) sustainable and not “one time” to win the challenge.
- All activities must be ethical
- Sign a contract to participate and agree to Journal entries at least 3 times weekly with whatever you want to write about (”no activities”, successes, failures, boredom, each other, etc. are all allowable for entries)
After the challenge period ends, we collaborate on a letter to many admired authors or moguls (Kiyosaki - rich dad, Robert G. Allen - One Minute Millionaire, David Bach - finish rich, others?) and some poor dads, and other family members - especially your successful in-laws, and ask them to critique our efforts. After three months waiting for feedback (and we can even tell our letter recipients how long we will wait for a response), we decide who won.
The prize? a trophy-like bottle of dirt. (I’ll entertain an alternative)
Make no mistake, this is a real challenge. Barring that, what do you think of these ideas? Ideas that popped into my head just from this email: 1) My Letter to Robert Kiyosaki book that documents the creation of this game and becomes part of the Rich Dad series - 2) a game that starts with one person like you or me sending out prefabbed invitations to participate in this game to friends, family, co-workers at investment firms [certainly people that should practice what they preach but don’t], and others.
I’m making you a no-lose offer to be my partner by not necessarily being my partner. If you want to change, you can’t reject this offer. You can only decide when to accept it. One dollar earned can be a success by measurable standards and if you don’t play this game, what will get you started?
I was thinking about proposing that we start on January 1 but I’ll be no less busy. I’ll still be working on my basement, being a dad and husband, going to the dentist, dr., etc. There’s no time like the present to step out and do something different. Finally, as you’re well aware, if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten. How about it?
January 10th, 2006 at 9:20 pm
I don’t understand some of your post, but I get the gist of it. I’m not sure that it’s prudent to post every business thought, money making idea, etc… I realize that this isn’t Grand Central Station, but I believe that if we were to post the secret recipe to make a Coca-Cola, people would find it. Not to mention I think that we’ve come up with some very good ideas. Especially you.
Regarding the “Challenge” - What is the challenge? I understand the rules, I understand the difference between your goals and mine, but I don’t really see anything beyond that. You suggest good ideas (i.e. letters to role models). I don’t see what you’re offering (RE: “no lose-offer”). The point is that I have employees (greenbacks) working for me now and will be tomorrow as well. I’m working on increasing the number of them and their effectiveness each and every day. If you’re challenging me to improve my financial position, I accept that challenge. In fact, we are more or less born into that challenge, aren’t we? If you are challenging me to be a better person, I accept that challenge as well. My underlying question is how would you/we measure or quantify each other’s performance at the end of the challenge period? Is our performance measured by others or ourselves? Are we competing against each other or against the “rat race”?