TrevorNelDailyOnline

Far too often we get well-meaning social engineers and lesser-intentioned rentboycotters and strikers who tend to convey the message that profit is something akin to an evil in society.

How often have we seen these foolish antagonists tearing down the buildings, ideas, and concepts that have been developed by others in protest against the gains they are making.

But, quite plainly it is the inventiveness of honest entrepreneurs who are motivated by profit that leads to an improvement in living standards for all members of society.

Please note that I make no case for the immoral extortionist who seeks to con an unsuspecting public with fancy ideas and zero foundation.

Every new idea or concept can be intelligently analysed for it’s merits by studying the underlying value system of it’s developer and the primary intention of bringing the concept to the market.

If the primary intention can be analysed to have a potential positive benefit for all in the community being served, then profit should be accepted as the rightful secondary reward to the developer.

If making money without providing a benefit to someone is the developers primary intention, the concept is likely to have little society-building merit.

To check for this purely commercial intention, just look into the projects completed by the developer in the last 10 years and analyse who has benefited and if there were consistent losers.

It should be of concern to every intelligent member of society when we witness the first signs of envy and jealousy over the developments of a creative person in society.

Alarm bells should ring in our minds when we begin to see new laws designed to hinder the incentive of profit for honest entrepreneurs, because with these overly protective laws our society begins it’s backward slide into primitive times.

Points To Ponder

1. Entrepreneurs profit by helping others to profit.

2. Profit can be measured in more free time or benefits.

3. The more time to think the more society can profit.

4. Do I ever begrudge another’s honest profit?

5.Do I contribute to my society going forward or backward?

6.One small profit for man, one giant profit for Mankind.

Ends.

But, let’s consider what might have happened had the creative thinker been turned down when he first approached the other 99 villagers.

Let’s retrace our thoughts back to the moment after he had completed his mountain-side canal and offered to share it with them for 10 minutes of their time.

Imagine if they had said, “There’s only one of you and 99 of us. We’ll take whatever water we want from your dam. We’re not going to pay you anything, after all, water is free and you can’t stop us anyway.”

Isn’t that just what so many people say today about the many things they want in life:

“Why should we pay for our water? Why should we pay our rent? Why not go on strike for more pay for less work?”

What would have happened then?

Well, quite simply, the creative thinker would not have had the incentive to continue building upon the vast reservoir of potential time-saving thoughts in his mind.

Nor would he have had the time to solve the problems experienced by each member in his village, because his time would have been taken up by having to work all day to continue providing for his own bare necessities.

The villagers would have continued in their old primitive habits, forced to eke out their day to day living needs. All because they did not understand the importance of allowing man to profit from his inventiveness.

As simple as this great story is, it is a parody of what so often happens in our modern society.

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With his ever increasing time available to ponder ways of saving time and energy, he develops new concepts which saves the other 99 villagers enormous amounts of time. In return he asks for just 10% of their time saved. So everybody wins!

One day he notices that one of the villagers is an outstanding shoe-maker. He arranges to share some of his new found profit to feed and clothe the aspirant cobbler so that he can produce quality shoes for the rest of the villagers.

Again, the remaining 98 are charged 10% of the time they save not having to produce new shoes.

The creative thinker shares some of this new time he has earned with the cobbler, allowing him too to become more productive in shorter working hours, and also making a small profit.

Next, the creative thinker finds someone who produces the best clothes in the village, and offers him the same opportunity as the cobbler to help the remaining villagers save more time by not having to produce their own clothes.

And so it goes on, the creative thinker keeps finding ways to save more and more time for each of the villagers.

And he is also providing opportunities for those with special skills to profit by doing the things they are best suited to doing.

For the first time, each villager is becoming aware of the benefits of organised intelligence in their community and how it can better their own personal position in life.

As each person gains more time for themselves they begin to THINK!

Some of them begin to spend their time working on drawings, some produce intricate designs in beadwork, others begin to develop their musical skills.

And so the first signs of a cultured civilisation begins to emerge with it’s own Art, Design and Music which is passed on to others for a portion of their productive time.

Hence, honest PROFIT, very definitely, translates into PROGRESS.

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Realising the wealth of time he now had available to himself, he offered to share this new found freedom with the 99 others.

He offered to let them draw water from his dam, instead of spending one hour drawing from the spring, if they would each give him just ten minutes of their daily production time. He worked out that by giving each person in the village an extra 50 minutes each of additional time for themselves, he would receive in return an extra 990 minutes of their time each day.

This translates into some 16 hours each day that he would have someone else working for him. A magnificent profit!

But his creative entrepreneurial flair has also given everybody else in his village a profit of 50 extra minutes each day for themselves.

As time marches on, the creative thinker finds himself using his spare 16 hours to ponder new thoughts.

He notices that the water coming down the mountain-side has sufficient power to push stones and pieces of wood out of the way.

So he spends many months of his spare time in designing a very simple water-wheel, which he discovers can turn his stone mill to grind his corn.

Even more exciting, he recognises that his water-wheel has sufficient capacity to grind corn for everybody in the village.

So, once again he approaches the other 99 and offers to share his spare capacity on the water-wheel to grind their corn in exchange for 10% of the time they each save on this daily chore.

They all happily agree, leaving the creative thinker with MORE PROFIT! And the villagers with more time to do the things they want to do!

And so the creative thinker continues.

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Imagine a lost tribe of 100 primitive folk living on an island somewhere in the mid-Pacific. They are basically lacking in organised intelligence and know nothing of the technology we have today.

They just go through their daily lives trying to gather the bare necessities for living on a day-to-day basis.

Picture, for yourself, this primitive tribe living at the foot of a mountain, from the top of which is derived their only source of fresh spring water.

Each day as each of these 100 people need water, they take a trip up to the top of the mountain to get their own personal supply for the day.

Every day this trip takes everybody in the tribe 30 minutes to get to the top, and 30 minutes to get back down again. A hour-long trip in all.

Until one day, a creative thinker in the tribe comes up with the idea of building a small canal all the way from the spring at the top of the mountain down to the tribe’s village.

He shares his idea with the others who decide he’s got to be crazy and dismiss his scheme as foolishness.

As most entrepreneurs do, he decides to start working on his plan anyway and begins to fashion away a rough canal down the mountainside to a small dam at the back of his hut.

Each day for months he spends some of his spare time digging away into the mountainside while the other ninety-nine people looked on in amusement.

Until finally, the day came when when the spring began to fill up his dam and he no longer had to spend two hours of his day fetching water.

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Too many people in our world today live under the impression that our lives are governed by an apparent scarcity of resources. These are the people who believe that the only way you can make money is to take it from someone else.

This has given rise to the extremely vulgar description of one, who takes advantage of other peoples necessity and hardship, to make unduly large and unjustifiable profits, as a “profiteer”.

This unfortunate description is responsible for creating an inordinate lack of respect for the concept of making an honourable profit.

To clarify the importance of profit, it is necessary to understand that profit arises when an entrepreneur builds an enterprise that creates a difference in the lives of others.

Whether it be by using the entrepreneur’s product or service, the consumers will only contribute to the entrepreneurs overall profit if they perceive that the product or service will make a difference in their lives. No intelligent consumer will purchase something they don’t want.

But why profit? Why not give away your product or service for the good of your community, as some social engineers and their ideologies would have us do?

Well, this interesting question was handled for me in a very simple presentation made many years ago which left an indelible impression in my mind.

More tomorrow:

Preface 15 – The Ultimate Gift – ‘In the end, life lived to its fullest is its own Ultimate Gift.’

Red Stevens’ gave his final message from his video: ‘ Jason, I want to tell you how proud of you I am. You have completed each element and received each part of The Ultimate Gift I had planned for you. I wish that I had come into possession of all twelve gifts as early in life as you have. Now that you have received The Ultimate Gift, not only do you have the privilege of enjoying it, but you have the responsibility of living your life to its fullest with each gift in balance. You have the further responsibility of passing along The Ultimate Gift whenever possible.’

It was then that Jason learnt that he had been left control of the Red Stevens’ charitable trust fund – worth over $1billion. This fund was intended to support ‘…The Red Stevens Home for Boys, The Red Stevens Library Program, several scholarship programs, hospitals, and many other worth institutions.’

A lovely story… and a Gift to anyone who reads it and applies its lessons.

Jim Stovall… you truly do see life clearly through your blindness. I doff my cap, Sir.

Bibliography:

Stovall, Jim ‘The Ultimate Gift’

Publ. Executive Books 1999

Ends.

Preface 14. The Gift of Love – ‘Love is a treasure for which we can never pay. The only way we keep it is to give it away.’

Month 12… the final month. Says Red Stevens: ‘Jason’ in this last month, I’m going to introduce you to the one part of my Ultimate Gift to you that encompasses all the other gifts as well as everything good you will ever do, have, or know in your life. That is The Gift of Love.’

‘Anything good, honourable, and desirable in life is based in love. Anything bad or evil is simply without the love involved.’

Jason’s task was to explore how love was involved in all the other gifts that he had experienced.

Jason returned with a list:

The Gift of Work – ‘I learned there is a certain love that comes from doing a job well’. He discovered that satisfaction for a job well done gives you a love for life.

The Gift of Money – ‘I learned that loving money leads to a hollow, empty existence. But when you learn how to love people and use money, everything is in its proper perspective.’

The Gift of Friends – ‘I learned that you can love others in a way I had never known. When you just worry about yourself, you are always disappointed. But when you think about others first and their well-being, everything works out best for you and for them.’

The Gift of Learning – ‘I discovered that people who have no material things – but a passion to learn and a true love of learning – are really quite wealthy. This love for knowledge has come into my life, and I cannot believe that I was so self-centred that I ignored the wisdom of the ages as I pursued my own self-destruction.’

The Gift of Problems – ‘This taught me that obstacles are nothing more than a challenge we face. When you look at your problems through a spirit of love, you realise that there is a grand design to this world, and the problem is given to you for the lesson it will teach you and the better person it will make you.’

The Gift of Family – ‘I learnt that families are present when love is present. People can become a family when they add love to their relationships. Without love, families are just a group of people who share the family tree.’

The Gift of Laughter – ‘This taught me that in order to love life you have to enjoy it. And when you can laugh at the good things and the bad, you will begin to feel the love life really has to offer.’

The Gift of Dreams – ‘I came to understand that life has been given to us with a sense of love for everything around us. Our passions and dreams and goals are the outward manifestations of the love we feel inside.'

The Gift of Giving – ‘When you give out love, both the giver and the receiver have more than they started with.’

The Gift of Gratitude – ‘…taught me that we can truly feel and experience love when we remember and enjoy all the wonderful things we have been given.’

The Gift of a Day – ‘I learned that if I only had twenty-four hours left to live, I would want to feel and experience as much love as I could and pass it on as much as possible.’

The Gift of Love – ‘I would have to cite as an example what my Uncle Red did for me and gave me during this last year. When we truly love someone else, our love makes us a different person, and it makes them a different person. My Uncle Red’s love for me in giving me The Ultimate Gift, forever changed my life and who I am.’

And with that Jason thanked Mr. Hamilton and Miss Hastings for facilitating his life-changing experience, hugged them both, and turned to leave with a new direction in his life.

It was then that he got the surprise of his life.

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Not being Catholic, I still cannot help being hugely caught up in the admiration of a truly GREAT man's passing. From all the documentaries of his life and times, it seems that Pope John Paul II has left one of the most significant legacies of the past 20th Century. His is a fine example of intellect, courage, action, humility and lately, personal suffering borne so bravely. He may well be only the third Pope to be given the title... 'The GREAT'.

I must be honest, however, I think that such a LEADERSHIP position, should have EVEN MORE significant an impact for bringing world leaders together to relieve the suffering of the poverty-stricken in the world. For me, the next Pope, must meet this challenge in a BIG way. I'd like to see this Pope take the pioneering world forays of Pope John Paul II and stimulate world leaders and state leaders to be in the forefront of helping their people who are suffering in their lands.

Preface 13. The Gift of a Day – ‘Life at its essence boils down to one day at a time. Today is the day!

Month 11, Red continues: ‘As I have been going through the process of creating my will and thinking about my life and my death, I have considered all the elements in my life that have made it special. I have reviewed many memories, and I carry them with me like a treasure.’

‘When you consider your own mortality, you contemplate how much of life you have lived versus how much you have left. It is like the sand slipping through an hourglass. I know that at some point I will live the last day of my life. I have been thinking about how I would want to live that day or what I would do if I had just one day left to live. I have come to realise that if I can get that picture in my mind of maximising one day, I have mastered the essence of living, because life is nothing more than a series of days. If we can learn how to live one day at its fullest, our lives will be rich and meaningful.’

Jason’s task was to spend the month thinking about what he would want to do on the last day of his life.

As the reviewer I like to think that this exercise can be further enhanced by asking people what they think will happen to them on the day that they die… and if they don’t know, to search for the answer – Seek and ye shall find..!

Jason returned with a simple list designed to enjoy the day sharing his gratitude with friends and people who had an impact on his life. ‘I would tell them how much they meant to me, and I would want to give them each a gift which would be the recipe for getting the most out of their days and, therefore, their entire lives.’

‘In the evening I would like to have a special banquet for all my friends and their friends… and I would like to stand up on a platform and share with everyone the gifts that my Great Uncle Red left to me. I would want to have it videotaped so that my dream of sharing this wonderful gift with other young people like me could go on after I died.’

More tomorrow: