A Businessman And A Cheque Story - Personal Power



Years ago, a business executive was deep in debt and could see no way out. Creditors were closing in on him. Suppliers were demanding payment. He sat on the park bench, head in hands, wondering if anything could save his company from bankruptcy.

Suddenly an old man appeared before him. "I can see that something is troubling you," he said. After listening to the executive's woes, the old man said, "I believe I can help you."

He asked the man his name, wrote out a check, and pushed it into his hand saying, "Take this money. Meet me here exactly one year from today, and you can pay me back at that time." Then he turned and disappeared as quickly as he had come.

The business executive saw in his hand a check for $500,000 signed by John D. Rockefeller, one of the richest men in the world! "I can erase my money worries in an instant!" he realized.

Nonetheless, the executive decided to put the check in his safe first. Just knowing it was there would give him the strength to work out a way to save his business, and he could always fall back on it later, he thought.

With renewed optimism, he negotiated better deals and got extended terms of payment from creditors. Soon he was closing big sales. Within a few months, he was out of debt and making money once again.

Exactly a year later, he returned to the park with that uncashed check. The old man did not appear for some time, yet the business executive decided to wait for a while more.

A while later, the old man came along the way but seemed to be unmindful of the business executive. He stopped the old man and was about the hand over the cheque with a few words of thanks, as well as share his success story.

Suddenly, a nurse came running up and grabbed the old man. "I'm so glad I caught him!" she cried. "I hope he hasn't been bothering you. He's always escaping from the rest home and telling people he's John D. Rockefeller." And she led the old man away by the arm.

The astonished executive just stood there, stunned. All year long he'd been wheeling and dealing, buying and selling, convinced he had half a million dollars behind him.

Suddenly, he realized that it wasn't the money, real or imagined, that had turned his life around. It was his new found self-confidence that gave him the power to achieve anything he went after.

Moral: Confidence is nothing but the distant vision held positively no matter what comes in between. It comes from one's own commitment and dedication and is entirely internal. You have it within, unleash your personal power!




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Selling Wooden Combs To Monks





Once upon a time, the owner of a large store announced that he wished to hire a manager to oversee his expanding business. His need was urgent and he was prepared to make an unprecedented offer to the best talent available. This news immediately attracted hundreds of applicants.

Even after a rigorous selection process, there were still ten applicants left for the one opening. The owner faced this group and said: "All of you have such incredible qualifications that it is difficult to make a final choice. The only fair way to proceed is to hold a sales challenge. The winner of this challenge shall be our new manager."

"What are the rules of this challenge?" One of the applicants asked.

"It is quite simple," said the owner. "I have many imported wooden combs in my warehouse, and the most difficult challenge I can think of is to sell them to monks. The one who sells the most wooden combs shall be the winner."

The applicant was surprised: "What? Selling wooden combs to monks? Is this a joke?"

Another applicant was angry: "Even fools know that combs are useless to the monks with their shaven heads. Why not ask us to sell water to fish instead?"

Most of the applicants left. Some took offense at the challenge, which they said was clearly impossible. Only three candidates remained. The owner of the company asked them to come back after two weeks to report their results.

Fourteen days later, at the appointed time, the three candidates returned. The owner asked them: "How did you do? How many wooden combs did you sell to monks?"

The first candidate said: "I sold one. This proves that the challenge is not impossible after all."

The owner was curious: "One? How did you sell it?"

The candidate described his many attempts to talk to monks about the combs. Many of the monks ignored him; some accused him of deliberate mockery. He had all but given up when he spotted one monk who was suffering from an itchy scalp. He approached this monk and suggested that the wooden comb could be used for scratching. The monk liked the idea and bought it.

The second candidate stepped forward: "That's very clever, but I was able to sell ten combs."

The owner was impressed: "Ten? How did you manage that? Don't tell me you found ten monks with itchy scalps!"

"No sir, there is a better way." The second candidate said: "I thought about this challenge and visited a temple high up in the mountains. This temple offers a beautiful view, but visitors often enter the temple with hair in disarray because it is very windy up there. I suggested to the abbot that it might be disrespectful to offer prayers in such a state. He agreed, and bought ten wooden combs which could be cleaned and lent to visitors who did not have their own."

"Ingenious!" The owner exclaimed. "You must be the person we are seeking."

"Not so fast, sir." The third candidate came forward. "I sold more than either of them."

"How many exactly?"

"A thousand wooden combs."

The owner and the other candidates were startled. It seemed like an impossible result, particularly for a task that so many applicants considered impossible in the first place. They all asked: "But how?"

"I know it must seem unbelievable to you," the third candidate said. "I went to one of the most popular temples around. Many patrons and pilgrims came into this temple every day. I spoke to the most senior Master and thanked him for providing this sacred place for the people. He was most gracious and said he also wished to thank the people for their support. I told him that a great way to express his appreciation would be to give each visitor a blessing."

The candidate continued: "The Master asked how the blessing could be given to all the visitors. I showed him the wooden combs, which I had already engraved with various words of blessing. I told him that it was something people would use daily, so it could serve as a constant reminder for them to do good deeds. He declared it was exactly what he needed, and immediately ordered a thousand wooden combs."

"You got lucky," one of the other candidates said bitterly.

"Not really," the owner countered. "He had a plan, which was why he had the wooden combs engraved prior to his visit. Even if that temple did not want it, another one surely would."

"There is more," the third candidate smiled. "I went back to the temple yesterday to check on the Master. He said many visitors told their friends and family about the wooden combs with the blessings. Now even more people are visiting every day. Everyone is asking for the wooden combs, and giving generous donations too! The temple is more popular than ever, and the Master says he will run out of the wooden combs in a month... and will need to order more!"



Moral:

Like the first candidate, we can secure sales by satisfying a customer's personal need. But this is only a beginning, and often may not be enough. 

We can then plan to attract the customers behind the customer, like the second candidate. Everyone is connected to someone else, within an intricate web of relationships. Customers aren't just sole individuals, as they can influence other people in their personal network. Satisfying the needs of this group can expand a Salesperson's target audience from a few dozen to hundreds.

However, the highest level of sales is a continuing business relationship, as demonstrated by the third candidate. At this level, everyone involved receives a positive outcome as a result of the sale. 

Everyone has benefitted; the temple patrons received the wooden combs as gifts; the temple benefitted from more visitors and donations; the third candidate won the managerial position; the owner of the store gained a great customer; even the engraver benefitted from the regular, repeating business. 





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Sleeping Through The Storm




Years ago, a farmer who owned much land needed help, and constantly advertised for hired hands. 

But many people were reluctant to work on the farm. They dreaded the awful storms that raged across the country from time to time, wreaking havoc on the buildings and crops, and endangering their lives.

As the farmer interviewed applicants for the job, he received a steady stream of refusals. Finally, a young man approached the farmer. 

"Are you a good farmhand?" the farmer asked him. "Well, I can sleep through the storm," answered the young man. 

Although puzzled by this answer, the farmer, desperate for help, hired him. The young man worked well around the farm, busy from dawn to dusk, and the farmer felt satisfied with the young man's work.

Several weeks passed. Then suddenly one night, a powerful storm rips through the valley. Awakened by the swirling rain and howling wind, the farmer leaps out of bed. He quickly pulled on his clothes and went to the young man's room to wake him up, so that together they could put the farm in shape for the storm.

Pound as he might on the door, there was no response.

Angry and frustrated, the farmer was tempted to fire the young man on the spot. Instead, he hurried outside to prepare for the storm. 

To his amazement, he discovered that all of the haystacks had been covered with tarpaulins. The cows were in the barn, the chickens were in the coops, and the doors were barred. The shutters were tightly secured.

He raced to the silo. The doors were latched and the grain was dry. The tractor was indoors. Everything was tied down. Nothing could blow away. 

As the farmer returned to bed after his unnecessary trip around the farm in the rain, he finally understands. ‘He sleeps through a storm.’ The young man did his work so well, and so thoroughly, that he did not need to worry in the time of storm. He knew that he was prepared for everything.

The young man was able to sleep soundly because he had secured the farm against the storm. If we live our lives the same way, the storm will never bother us, because we will be ready for it.

When you're prepared, you have nothing to fear. Can you sleep soundly when the storm blows through your life?





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Don’t Work. Avoid Telling The Truth. Be Hated. Love Someone.


—–


Written by Adrian Tan, author of The Teenage Textbook (1988). Adrian Tan was the guest-of-honour at a NTU convocation ceremony. This was his speech to the graduating class of 2008.

 
—–


I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information for inviting me to give your convocation address. It’s a wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here for ten minutes without fear of contradiction, defamation or retaliation. I say this as a Singaporean and more so as a husband.


My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one. She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living. She has honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by practising at home during conversations between her and me.


On the other hand, I am a litigator. Essentially, I spend my day telling people how wrong they are. I make my living being disagreeable.


Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our matrimonial home. That is because when an editor and a litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is always the wife.


And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you’ve already won her heart, you don’t need to win every argument.


Marriage is considered one milestone of life. Some of you may already be married. Some of you may never be married. Some of you will be married. Some of you will enjoy the experience so much, you will be married many, many times. Good for you.


The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation. The end of education. You’re done learning.


You’ve probably been told the big lie that “Learning is a lifelong process” and that therefore you will continue studying and taking masters’ degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on. You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers. Don’t you think there is some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the business of learning, after all. Where would they be without you? They need you to be repeat customers.


The good news is that they’re wrong.


The bad news is that you don’t need further education because your entire life is over. It is gone. That may come as a shock to some of you. You’re in your teens or early twenties. People may tell you that you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old. That is your life expectancy.


I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the term to mean the average life span of a group of people. But I’m here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life.


You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as the country with the third highest life expectancy. We are behind Andorra and Japan, and tied with San Marino. It seems quite clear why people in those countries, and ours, live so long. We share one thing in common: our football teams are all hopeless. There’s very little danger of any of our citizens having their pulses raised by watching us play in the World Cup. Spectators are more likely to be lulled into a gentle and restful nap.


Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years. Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years, while Singapore women live more than five years longer, probably to take into account the additional time they need to spend in the bathroom.


So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you’ll have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper.


Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they’re 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn’t meet their life expectancy.


I’m here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy.


After all, it’s calculated based on an average. And you never, ever want to expect being average.


Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much.


That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste.


If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living your life according to boundaries set by average people. I have nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them. And you don’t need years of education by the best minds in Singapore to prepare you to be average.


What you should prepare for is mess. Life’s a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over it. Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate.


Don’t expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live. Your life is over as of today. At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows.


What does this mean for you? It is good that your life is over.
Since your life is over, you are free. Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are free.


The most important is this: do not work.


Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable.


Work kills. The Japanese have a term “Karoshi”, which means death from overwork. That’s the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there’s nothing left. A rock has been ground into sand and dust.


There’s a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are “making a living”. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful.


People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free. The slogan “Arbeit macht frei” was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. Utter nonsense.


Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remaining sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.


Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself.


I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a litigator. I enjoy it and I would do it for free. If I didn’t do that, I would’ve been in some other type of work that still involved writing fiction – probably a sports journalist.


So what should you do? You will find your own niche. I don’t imagine you will need to look very hard. By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want to do. In fact, I’ll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this time you should know what your obsessions are. If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior, you might become a teacher.


Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working.


Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I’m not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.


In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it. That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the mirror.


I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth. I now say this to you: be hated.


It’s not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.


One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one’s own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong.


The other side of the coin is this: fall in love.


I didn’t say “be loved”. That requires too much compromise. If one changes one’s looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone.


Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. 


Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only kind of work that I find palatable.


Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul.


Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person. Despite popular culture, love doesn’t happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor. It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm.



You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the heart.


You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you.


Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone. You either don’t, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.


Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.


.....

Leave Us Alone

The Fate Of The Apostles

What was The Fate Of The Apostles? These have been compiled from various sources, most are passed down through the early church through stories, and may or may not be accurate.