Attitudes That Attract Success

The Big Idea
We give leis to say “Thank you” and we give leis to say “Goodbye.”

Our attitude is like a lei. If you string together a collection of dried fish, everything starts smelling fishy! If you string together old socks, the whole world has this funny odor to it.

Your attitude is like a fragrance you carry around with you. The difference is that skunks carry a bad odor while a beautiful Hawaiian plumeria blossom carries a fragrance.


Why You Need This Book
This book gives practical steps to building internal values and perspectives that will change your life!


Make Your Choice
So far too often we see the consequences of making a bad choice or walking through life with a bad attitude, and yet we choose that attitude anyway. Then when relationships fail, when we lose friends or forfeit a great opportunity, it really should be no surprise.

Deposit into your heart the necessary ingredients to develop a life-changing attitude. Make that choice right now. The new attitude may feel awkward at first, but practice until it becomes natural.

You are only one attitude away from a great life, a successful marriage and a promising future!

Your attitude is the set of your sail. You must choose the direction you want your life to travel and set your heart accordingly.

There will be storms, but it will be your attitude toward those storms that drives you in one direction or another, not the storm itself.

A poor attitude in the midst of the storm can cause the storm to rage inside for a lifetime.

You will see problems everywhere, but don’t allow your eyes to remain focused on them. Develop a new perspective – a fresh view of your problems.

Don’t hang around the swamps of despair. They will only skew your attitude and impede your resilience. Learn to bounce back quickly.

Don’t miss the ride! Don’t forget to laugh. There is plenty to laugh about in life, and we need to laugh.

Whatever it is, take time to enjoy life in its simplest form.

Make a new friend today. A great place to start is with your family.

Life is too short for that. By establishing deep friendships with your family, you’ll begin to reap one of life’s greatest promises and rewards.

Pause long enough to enjoy the ride. You will be pleasantly surprised how a new perspective will help you to develop an attitude that attracts friends, laughter, joy and success!


Raise the Bar of Excellence
We need to practice having an excellent attitude in each and every endeavor, for it will always be true that we can improve the way we see problems, people and life.

Even if it’s only 1 percent each day, improve something about yourself. If you can improve just 1 percent a day, that means over one year you will have improved more than 300 percent for your life.

Raise the bar!


Play the Right Background Music
As you dwell on these memories, experiences and thoughts, they are recorded on the soundtrack of your mind and play continuously all day long.

Whatever you play on this internal sound system affects everything about you – your attitude, your self-image, your confidence level, your relationships, the way you communicate with others and even your faith. Memories hang on for a long time if you let them.

What is your play list? You get to make the selections, so choose wisely!



Practice, Practice, Practice!
Love
Am I consistently committed to helping others develop and discover the very best in their lives?

Peace
Do I bring a calming effect to every situation, or do I stir up people’s feathers? Do I tend to fix the blame or fix the problem?

Patience
Do I give people room to fail, and then help them look for the lessons of life that can be extracted from that failure?

Kindness
When working with people under my supervision or care, do I appeal to them kindly?

Gentleness
How do I deal with others’ failures, especially if it affects me?

Self-control
The more you practice these things, the more fruitful you’ll be in your attitude, business, and family. So practice, practice, practice!

Finish Well
Each of us can live an extraordinary life with an attitude of excellence, but it must be diligently cultivated. Let’s take a look at four keys to living an extraordinary life.

Aim for the Right Target.
An attitude that attracts success begins with knowing which opportunities to accept and which to reject. This way you will begin to develop not just an existence but a LIFE.

Remember, first aim for the right target.

Run the Right Race.
You cannot run someone else’s race; you can only run your own. If you run the wrong race, you’ll end up at the wrong finish line.

Understand What Satisfies Your Soul.
Contentment cannot be acquired directly. Truly content people are those whose aim in life is something much bigger than attaining mere contentment alone.

Learn to understand what truly satisfies you – what satisfies your soul. Otherwise, you will never develop an attitude of true contentment.

Make Contentment an Inside Job.
Contentment is vital in developing an extraordinary attitude and, as discussed in the previous point, must be aimed for instead of instant and all too temporary gratification. The prisoner on the top bunk was staring out the window of his cell into the night sky.

The stars were spread out in a splendid array, with an occasional shooting star making the evening sky a spectacular display of fireworks.

Calling to his cell mate in the bunk below, the man said, “Hey, wake up! Look at the stars! “Aw, leave me alone,” his cell mate grunted.

The stars tonight are the brightest I’ve ever seen!”

One prisoner saw the stars; the other saw the bars. It all depends on your attitude, doesn’t it?

Contentment is an inside job. Choose a good attitude that you might experience life the way it was meant to be lived!

But it takes training, discipline and desire to develop your perspective to see what’s good. Choose, because both will be present – the stars and the bars. Look for the stars.

You’re only one attitude away from a fantastic life!

Business Book Summary Provider Launches a Business Book Discussion Forum

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Lasting Lessons from the Corner Office

Lasting Lessons from the Corner Office uncovers the secrets behind the success of the great CEOs through their lives and personal stories.

Why did Ray Kroc's plan for McDonald's thrive when all the other burger joints failed? How can we apply his lessons to Krispy Kreme? How did Walt Disney's most dismal day as a young cartoonist radically change his career direction?

We learn about their biggest challenges and failures, and how they successfully rode the waves of demographic and technological change. When Estée Lauder was a child in Queens, New York, the average American spent $8 a year on toiletries.

How did she spot an opportunity in high-priced cosmetics? Why did she pound on the doors of Saks? How did Thomas Watson, Jr., decide to roll the dice and put all of IBM's chips on computing, when his father thought it could be a losing idea?

Lasting Lessons from the Corner Office not only fascinates with the personal lives of these CEOs, it shows how we can transfer their ideas today to the triumphs and struggles of Sony, Dell, Costco, Carnival Cruises, Time Warner, and numerous other companies trying to figure out how to stay on top, or climb back up. The featured CEOs in this book were not candidates for sainthood. Many of them knew "God" only as a prefix to "damn it." But they were devoted to their businesses, not just to their egos, personal bank accounts, and yachts.

Extraordinarily fresh and deeply thoughtful, Todd G. Buchholz's Lasting Lessons from the Corner Office is a truly enjoyable and fun—yet serious and realistic—look at what we still have to learn and absorb from these former CEOs.

This book blends the lives and the business challenges of the featured CEOs in order to expose their strengths and the circumstances they had to overcome. This book features CEOs who relied on more dependable, more human drives. Drives that took them on fascinating rides.

Come find out.

The Seven Rules Of Wall Street

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The Seven Rules Of Wall Street

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Pilgrimage To Warren Buffets Omaha

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Pilgrimage To Warren Buffets Omaha

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Pilgrimage to Warren Buffet’s Omaha

Pilgrimage to Warren Buffet’s Omaha A Hedge Fund Manager’s Dispatches from Inside the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting By Jeff Matthews

The Big Idea
They come to Omaha by the tens of thousands, flocking to an annual meeting that has become legendary for investors, businesspeople, and fans of one of the savviest capitalists on the planet. They come to eat steak, buy furniture at a discount, and bask in the brilliance of value investor extraordinaire Warren Buffet.

Hedge fund founder, financial blogger, and professional skeptic Jeff Matthews got his own highly-coveted ticket to the 2007 and 2008 Berkshire Hathaway shareholders’ meetings that covered the 2006 and 2007 fiscal years and held only for shareholders and their guests, and proceeded to post reports on his blog, offering tempting glimpses into the much-discussed meeting. This well-written, easy-to-read book is an expanded version of Jeff Matthews’ original essay.


Why You Need This Book
Matthews delivers a full-length account of his adventures at this infamous financial hoedown, and answers many questions, including:

Does Buffett's famed penny-pinching cripple his companies?

Why does Buffet – a bridge partner and best friend of Bill Gates – not own any technology stocks?

How does the extremely rational Buffett square his well-known social progressiveness with his lily-white audience of investors?

Is Buffet really an "Oracle"?
What information, insights, and ideas do the meeting's attendees pick up, and how do they put this information to use in their own investments?

Will Berkshire-Hathaway survive his death?

Matthews also applies his financial acumen to harvesting potent lessons from his experiences that you can use as you survey the investment field, from finding how the world’s greatest investor evaluates not only businesses but the people who run them, to the importance of “just reading and thinking” and the value of having a smart, cynical partner.



Why Omaha?
As great as his track record is, and as wise as his pearls of wisdom are, Warren Buffett’s investment philosophy does seem narrow-minded and old-fashioned. He focuses on a handful of industries he knows well – insurance, home furnishings, business services, and anything else that fits within his famed “circle of competence.”

And the rest he leaves alone.

Like pay phones in a wireless world, Buffett seems increasingly antiquated – even irrelevant – to more flexible, wide-ranging investors who have grown up in a highly connected, technologically independent world.

Of course, neither Buffett nor his “quality shareholders” express any remorse over missing Google or Apple or even Microsoft, outside his circle of competence as those investments are. After all, while many investors have had better years than Warren Buffett, and some may have had better decades, Buffett’s track record over the long haul is, quite literally, unsurpassed.


The Newspaper Generation
Almost every person sitting around, waiting for the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting to begin, is reading a newspaper. It is an open, relaxed, inviting, approachable kind of posture.

Blackberry readers, on the other hand, tend to be hunched over, head bowed, reading the text. It is a closed, tense, uninviting, not-very-approachable posture.

It’s no wonder that Warren Buffett reportedly makes it a point never to trade stocks when he’s in New York City.



The Oracle of Omaha
If there is one word that describes Warren Buffett, the “Oracle of Omaha,” it is not oracular. Nor is it prophetic, divinatory, clairvoyant, extrasensory, or telepathic. While he may be known as “the Oracle of Omaha,” there is in truth absolutely nothing oracular about him.

Yet it is true that in May 1969, near the peak of that era’s bull market, he wrote to the investors in his partnership that “opportunities for investment… have virtually disappeared,” closed his partnership, and kept only two stocks: a retailer that he later sold, and an old-line textile company named Berkshire Hathaway, which he decided to keep.

And it is true that in October 1974, after the Dow Jones Industrial Average had collapsed and with the American economy mired in gasoline shortages and price controls, Buffett made perhaps the most unequivocally bullish – and correct – utterance on the subject of investing ever recorded by any business publication when he told Forbes magazine: “Now is the time to invest and get rich.”


Budding Buffetts: Where to Begin
The question is, “What should I do to become a great investor?”, and it is asked for the first time by an earnest 17-year old from San Francisco who says he is attending his tenth consecutive meeting.

Buffett’s emphatic answer is simple and straightforward: “Read everything you can,” he says with finality.

Buffett’s reading habits did not stop when he was 10. He still reads literally thousands of financial statements and annual reports each year – as he has done for each of the last 50 or more years that he’s been investing.

Of course there is more to what has made Buffett a great investor than this. But it all began by reading.

Each time the question is asked, Buffett makes it clear he is not sure where the world is going and what will happen now, but things are about as good as they’ll ever get. “Corporate profits as a percent of gross domestic product have increased from 4 to 6 percent to 8 percent.”

“You have lots of businesses earning 20 percent on tangible equity in a world where corporate bonds are yielding 4 to 5 percent. That’s astonishing. If you read a book, it would say it’s not possible.” Buffett holds his palms wide apart to illustrate the high level of profits. “Namely labor.”

Buffett also discusses the “extraordinary” profits now prevailing in the banks and the financial sector. “We’ve invested in and owned banks. If 20 years ago you’d asked me whether it was possible, in a world of 4.75 percent bonds, that countless banks would earn 20 percent-plus returns on tangible equity, I’d have said no.

Munger, Buffett’s business partner and friend, follows with his own observation, one that will prove, in retrospect, at one unremarkable yet quite profound. “A lot of profits are not in manufacturing or retailing,” he says somberly,” but in financial sectors.

There’s been a huge flow of profits to banks and investment banks. Buffett finishes with a coda for the times: “Corporate America is living in the best of all worlds – and history has shown this is not sustainable.


Secrets in Plain Sight
The “secrets” to Warren Buffet’s success are hidden in plain sight. He talks about his methods freely with anybody who asks. Buffett gives perhaps his best advice to a teacher at an Orlando community college who asks what she should be teaching her students about financial matters.

“How would you treat it?” Buffett asks rhetorically. “You’d read the owner’s manual five times; you’d change the oil twice as often as you do now… Buffett’s own most noteworthy habits – frugality and rationality – have certainly followed him throughout his life. And they have made him, for the moment, the richest human being in the world.


The “Yes” Won’t Change
Buffett stripped down concepts ranging from investing for beginners to nuclear proliferation to their bare essence:

WHAT IT MEANS TO INVEST. “What we’re doing in an investment is we’re laying out money now to get more money back in the future.”

“We want a business with a durable competitive advantage, management we trust, at a price that we understand.”

WHY HE DOESN’T HIRE AUDITORS WHEN HE BUYS A BUSINESS. “If you think the auditors know more about making an acquisition than you do, you ought to take up accounting and let the auditors run the business.”

ON EGREGIOUS CORPORATE COMPENSATION. “The idea that you have to pay some guy a $10 million retention bonus to keep him around – I don’t know of a CEO in America that wouldn’t gladly do the job at half the price or a quarter of the price.”

HOW TO CHANGE EGREGIOUS CORPORATE COMPENSATION. “If the half dozen largest institutions would simply withhold their votes and issue a short statement why they’re doing it, it would work. Big shots don’t like to get embarrassed.”

WHAT A SMALL INVESTOR SHOULD DO TO START INVESTING. “Put it all in a low-cost index fund, like Vanguard.”

I can tell people ‘yes,’ and that won’t change. The $6.5 billion will be available whether a nuclear bomb goes off in New York City, or whether Ben Bernanke runs off with Paris Hilton.”

WHY THE DERIVATIVES MARKET GOT OUT OF HAND. “You had to read 750,000 pages to evaluate one security, and that was madness.”

WHEN REGULATION FAILED. “We had this organization called OFHEO [Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight] whose sole purpose was to oversee two companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac… They had 200 people going to work at nine every morning, whose sole job was to oversee Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and they had two of the biggest financial scams ever, so they were two for two.”

WHY MASS TRANSIT ISN’T USED. “The American public doesn’t like mass transit. I used to be involved in bus companies, and you can make all kinds of rational arguments to people about mass transit. But one person per car seems to be an enormously popular method of moving around.”

WHY THE CHINA OLYMPICS SHOULDN’T BE BOYCOTTED. WHY NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION IS STILL A THREAT. You’ve got 6.5 billion people in the world, so there are close to twice as many people that wish ill on other people as you had when the population was 3 million.”

THE MOST IMPORTANT JOB IN LIFE. You provide warmth and food, and they’re learning about the world… and you don’t get any rewind button.”

The Berkshire shareholder meeting is more than a pilgrimage for 31,000 investors: it’s big business here in Omaha.

Will the phone at Berkshire still ring when Warren Buffett is no longer there to pick it up?

A lot of other people around Omaha certainly hope so.

BusinessSummaries.com is a business book summaries service. Every week, it sends out to subscribers a 9- to 12-page summary of a best-selling business book chosen from among the hundreds of books printed out in the United States. For more information, please go to http://www.bizsum.com

Free Book Summary : Negotiate Like the Pros

Free Book Summary : Negotiate Like the Pros A Top Sports Negotiator’s Lessons for Making Deals, Building Relationships, and Getting What You Want

Author: Kenneth L. Shropshire
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Books, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-07-154831-1
208 pages

The Big Idea

Do you want to be a better negotiator? Do you want to negotiate with the same success and confidence that you see among the professionals who handle teams, leagues, athletes – the sort of people you see in the sports pages and on ESPN – on a daily basis? In Negotiate Like the Pros, author Kenneth L. Shropshire explores powerful negotiating strategies, and teaches you how to use them to score big in any negotiation.

Prepare With Passion

To begin, you’ll have to understand both how to prepare and why taking the time to do so can be the most valuable transformation you can make in your negotiating life. That viewpoint dominates in sports, and it should be just as prevalent in business dealings.

Establish the road map to get from the beginning of the negotiation to the end result that you desire. Your counterpart will of course want to establish an agenda that will drive the conversation in a direction most favorable to him or her.

Begin with the basics - preparation puts you in the best possible position to win, whatever winning might be in a given setting.

Be prepared for negative circumstances as well as for positive ones. Your counterpart may know that single piece of information you thought he lacked. He may actually have another option that you did not foresee.

Stick with Your Style

Understand your most comfortable bargaining style as well as how to use it to your advantage rather than fretting about a style that does not come easily to you. In sports, we most often express this as “playing within yourself.”

It is vital to know who you are and who your opponent is in terms of style and, maybe more importantly, not to try to be someone you are not. Discover your strengths and base your preparation strategy on them. Be honest with yourself about what kind of negotiator you are, what you’re good at, and what you are not so good at.

Make the negotiation environment as favorable as possible to your style and your comfort level. Once you have a grasp of your style, you want to set the stage for the negotiation so that it is advantageous to you and detrimental to your counterpart.

Set Goals and Aim High

It is important to establish goals and make them a regular part of your preparation process. It is not unusual for sports teams to begin a season aiming for an event or for the Olympics by setting goals for the number and types of medals they will win. It is clear that the higher your goals are and the more support you have for them, the more successful you are likely to be.

Know your walk-away point. What is the minimum you will accept? Be as firm as you can about your walk-away point as you enter the negotiation. The best way to determine your walk-away point is to focus on your options.

What is the number, quantity, price, or whatever the metric is that you think, given the full impact of all of the information available, will close the deal fairly? This is the target, the bull’s-eye.

How should you establish goals? You do so with reference points, indicators that point you in the direction you want to go.

Seek Leverage

When establishing leverage, honesty is essential. Anyone can have success with a single deceitful act – maybe even several successes. But once your credibility is damaged, it is nearly impossible to get it back.

Leverage is fleeting. Circumstances can change, and you can lose it. How the parties view the future value of a deal is a fleeting concept too, but it comes up frequently in sports when the endorsement value of an unproven athlete needs to be determined.

Leverage is often supported, too, by the element of consistency. People want the same standard applied to them that was applied to others. People want to be perceived as being reasonable and want to act consistently for that reason.

Focus on Relationships and Interests

Go beyond the monetary side of deals and focus your attention on the other benefits that flow from them. For an athlete, such a side benefit may be a supportive relationship with the hometown crowd, as opposed to moving to a new city as a free agent for more money. In business, this benefit may be likened to a long-term relationship with a vendor or boss.

Those most successful in courting relationships take the time and make the effort to understand the interests of their clients. In most deals, this means that you need to comprehend what there is in a relationship with a counterpart that is important beyond the dollars and cents of the deal.

In creating your game plan, leave adequate time for thinking about relationships. The value of those relationships will be individual as well as cultural. If you are negotiating in another country, or with someone from a different country, be aware of the special issues that might be presented by virtue of this diversity.

Often those interests, the real reasons why someone wants to get a deal done, are non-monetary. The two are intertwined, as you cannot always get to a party’s interests unless you extend the effort to develop a relationship.

Fully contemplate the importance of current and future negotiations. Make sure, too, that you understand your counterpart’s true interest in closing the deal.

Negotiate Like a Pro

Winning certainly has a different meaning in every negotiation. Achieving that desired outcome is most likely to occur when we use all of the skills that we possess in a carefully prepared manner. Be prepared.

The magic of success really comes when you are able to practice with the same intensity that you use when you play, but are also able to play the game with the same relatively relaxed frame of mind that you have in practice. That is the challenge.

So where do we end up? With the lesson so many of us heard from our parents: do the best you can. You will know you are doing that when you combine all of the elements laid out in this book. Your bets get even better if your preparation is done at the highest level. You are not doing the best you can if you have not fully prepared.

To read the full 12-page summary of the book, please visit BusinessSummaries.com.