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See, in this book I want you thinking, “How do I win the game?” Yes, I believe that you were designed for accomplishment; I believe you’re engineered for success. I believe you’re endowed with the seeds of greatness. You are born to win, but you’ve got to have a plan if you are going to win.
But what is winning? Well, the reality is that all of us want basically the same thing. Everybody wants to be happy. I’ve never yet met anybody who said, “No, I want to be miserable!” Everybody wants to be healthy. Everybody wants to be at least reasonably prosperous, and I know many of you want to be unreasonably prosperous. That’s okay. I’ve had money and I haven’t had it, and I’m here to tell you—it’s better to have it, folks. There’s no question about it. A lot of times some of my Bible-reading friends will misquote the Bible and say, “Well now, you know, Zig, the Bible says that money is the root of all evil,” and, obviously, it doesn’t. It says the love of money is the root of all evil. Two-thirds of the parables Christ taught had to do with our physical and financial wellbeing. Two-thirds of the success stories had to do with that subject. There’s a lot more talk about success in the Bible than there is heaven. The Good Samaritan never could have put that old boy up at the inn after he’d been mugged if he hadn’t had some money to do it with! Now, all of that said, yes, everybody is interested in money. Everybody wants to be secure. They want to have friends, peace of mind. They want to have good family relationships, and they want to have hope that the future is going to be even better.
What part does hope play in all of this? I believe it’s the basis of everything. You see, John Maxwell says if there’s hope in the future, there’s power in the present. Answer these questions as you read:
How happy can you be if you have no hope?
How healthy would you be if you had no hope?
How prosperous could you be if you had no hope?
How secure are you with no hope?
How many friends would you be able to accumulate if you were the kind of person who was always moping and griping and complaining?
How much peace of mind would there be, and how would your family relationships be?
I think hope is the key to an awful lot of things. Let me emphasize a point; I will never tell you that acquiring these things is going to be easy. I know that life is tough. But I also know that when you’re tough on yourself, life can be tremendously rewarding to you. When you discipline yourself to do the things you need to do, when you need to do them, the day is going to come when you can do the things you want to do when you want to do them. But, my friends, the road to the top goes through lots of valleys. You do not develop champions on a feather bed. There has to be those trials and difficulties in order for you to develop the muscles and the qualities that are going to make such a difference in your life. One of the things I will be saying over and over is you have to be before you can do and you have to do before you can have.
Some years ago I was coming in on a plane—which is generally the way I fly—and I was seated next to an old boy. I couldn’t help but notice he had his wedding band on the index finger of his left hand. A little unusual. I said, “Friend, you’ve got your wedding band on the wrong finger!”
He said, “Yeah, I married the wrong woman!”
Well, I don’t know if he married the wrong woman or not. I’m delighted to be able to say I did not marry the wrong woman. Last November, the Redhead and I—now, when I talk about my wife, at her suggestion, I always call her The Redhead. When I’m talking to her, it’s Sugar Baby. Incidentally, her name is Jean. Now, The Redhead has been inducted into the MasterCard Hall of Fame, and she is so excited! She made the All-Mall team at Prestonwood Shopping Center eight years in a row, and last year she was MVP—Most Valuable Purchaser. A lot of times people say to me, “Does your wife know you say all of those things about her?” I tell them, “Shucks, she helps me write the material!”
Let me point something out. She never gets offended. If she did, I would not say it. But the reason she doesn’t get offended is she knows my heart. You see, we’d been married over 27 years before I was able to give her even financial stability, much less financial security. And yet, during all of those years, not once do I ever remember her saying, “Honey, if we just had more money, here’s what we could do.”
See, there was one five-year stretch when I was in seventeen different deals, and that’s all they were—just deals. But during all those years she would always say, “Honey, tomorrow’s gonna be better. You can do it!” Then the two things that meant the most to me, “I love you,” and “I believe in you.” I cannot begin to tell you what it meant to me to have a cheerleader cheering for me every day and praying for me every night of my life. I can tell you without any reservation, no fear of error, that had it not been for her, I would not have written this. That encouragement and support meant it all. She knows, and I know about her. First of all, half the money is hers. The ONLY time she goes berserk is when she’s shopping for the grandchildren. And, had we known grandchildren were going to be so much fun, we certainly would have been nicer to their parents! But anyhow, she knows I delight in seeing her go shopping because she’s very responsible and it’s a delight to be able to have her do that because for so long she could not.
One of the reasons I believe I’m qualified to make suggestions that will make a difference in your life is that I’ve walked in your shoes. Today I was reminiscing about something. The Redhead brought three twenty-dollar bills downstairs that I had left upstairs. And it reminded me of when I was a young salesman in Lancaster, South Carolina, when we were having such a struggle. I’d had my lights turned off. I’d had my telephone disconnected. I had to turn a car back in that I didn’t want to turn back in. My first baby was born, and the hospital bill was $64. I didn’t have $64. I had to get out and make two sales in order to get my own baby out of the hospital. And I so vividly remember one day, as I was struggling with how do I eat and how do we put gasoline in the car to go make the sales calls, and I was going through some of my drawers at home, and there were two twenty-dollar bills and a ten-dollar bill. It looked like all the money in the world!
I’ve been confused many times in my life. I didn’t know what I’d be doing tomorrow, much less next week, next month or five years down the path. I don’t believe there’s anybody who’ll ever read this who has been as despondent on occasion in those early years, and as puzzled and as curious. I’ve been down that route. Yes, I’ve hurt—as much as anybody, I believe. On May 13th of 1995 my oldest daughter went home to be with the Lord. I know what it is to feel pain. I’ve felt your feelings; I’ve walked in your shoes. I know what does work. I know what does not work, and that’s the reason I believe hope is such an important ingredient. John Johnson put it this way: “It’s not the color of your skin. It’s not the place of your birth. It’s the size of your hope that’s going to determine where you’re going to go in your life.”
John Johnson was born in a shotgun house with a tin roof in Arkansas City, Arkansas. For those of you who don’t know what a shotgun house is, let me tell you. It’s a house with a roof on it and it’s so named because you could point a shotgun and fire it through that house and it wouldn’t hit anything at all because it’s just a shell. Today John Johnson lives next door to Bob Hope part of the time; he lives in a high rise on the Gold Coast overlooking Lake Michigan the rest of the time. He’s been a guest in the White House with every president since Eisenhower. One of the 400 wealthiest people in America. Owns his own insurance company, own cosmetic company, and Ebony magazine. And when he says, “It’s not the place of your birth or the color of your skin, it’s the size of the hope," I take him very seriously because I do believe he knows what he is talking about.
How do you get all of the things? What’s involved? If an individual really