Profile of an Entreprenur – Steve Jobs

How some entrepreneurs change people lives.

A personal story by Daniel Morales, MBA

I recently read on the news that Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer and Pixar Studios is taking a leave of absence to recover from complication of pancreatic cancer. It is rumored that his prognosis is not that good and that the inevitable may soon come to pass. Let’s pray for his recovery and celebrate his life.

Steve is a true entrepreneur. He changed people lives and the world as we now know. He certainly changed my life. As I was entering college in 1977 to study my engineering degree, we were still using the IBM-370 mainframe machines and programming by punching cards and going through the card reading machines. It was quite a ritual.

Within a couple of years, we heard about a new machine called the Apple Computer. We went to the US side of the border and somehow managed to purchase one and got it through customs in Mexico. Since then, I have been in the forefront of computers and technology. Back then it was so exciting to be part of the new computer revolution.

In 1982 I started two companies, one in Texas, the other in Mexico. I was purchasing computers and accessories in the US, exporting them to Mexico and reselling then to small business and individuals. I sold those companies to come to the US to pursue my MBA at UCLA. Apple IIC and Apple IIE were our best selling products.

A few years later, I started my internet company in 1999 that eventually merged with a French software company. Once we raised the funds to secure a stronger management team, I had the opportunity of working with people who have worked directly under Steve Jobs. The stories and experiences they told me about him were awesome. He had so much energy and charisma that he needed several assistants just to keep up with him.

Take a look at this video and get a feel for his passion, vision and the energy back in 1983. This was the first introduction of the Apple Macintosh Computer. The now famous 1984 commercial that aired only one time in history and became a legend.

Steve Jobs is one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our generation. His success story is legendary. Put up for adoption at an early age, dropped out of college after 6 months, slept on friends’ floors, returned coke bottles for 5 cent deposits to buy food, then went on to start Apple Computers and Pixar Animation Studios.

Here are the 12 Rules of Success of Steve Jobs then watch him in the 2005 Stanford Graduation Ceremony.

1. Do what you love to do. Find your true passion. Do what you love to do a make a difference!

2. Be different. Think different.

3. Do your best. Do your best at every job. Hire good people with passion for excellence.

4. Make SWOT analysis. Make a list of strengths and weaknesses of yourself and your company on a piece of paper. Get rid of bad people.

5. Be entrepreneurial. Look for the next big thing. Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

6. Start small, think big. Take a handful of simple things to begin with, and then progress to more complex ones.

7. Strive to become a market leader. Be the first, and make it an industry standard.

8. Focus on the outcome. Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.

9. Ask for feedback. Ask for feedback from people with diverse backgrounds. Focus on those who will use your product, listen to your customers first.

10. Innovate. Innovation distinguishes a leader from a follower. Concentrate on really important creations and radical innovation. Hire people who want to make the best things in the world.

11. Learn from failures. Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly and move on.

12. Learn continually. Cross-pollinate ideas with others both within and outside your company. Learn from customers, competitors and partners. Learn to criticize your enemies openly, but honestly.

Lets celebrate the life of Steve Jobs, a true entrepreneur who inspires millions and changed our world.

Copyright © 2008 – Daniel Morales
Daniel Morales is an international trainer, speaker and business consultant. He is currently Director for the San Gabriel Valley SBDC Small Business Development Center, Hosted by Mt. San Antonio College in Los Angeles, California. As a serial entrepreneur and small business owner, he provides real life practical training and consulting for hundreds of businesses each year. To find out how Daniel can help you create prosperity by achieving your business goals faster, you can contact him at www.danielmorales.com

The Gift of Time

By: Daniel Morales, MBA

Every year at this time, we think about time and what we have done and accomplished during ththis year that is coming to an end and what we expect to do, goals and accomplishments for the next year.

Again, we are given a new gift of time.

We have a whole new year of opportunity.

As we look into next year, 2009, let’s look at it from a new perspective.

I see 12 months, 52 weeks, 365 days, 8,760 hours, 525,600 minutes, 31,536,000 seconds.

And all of it is a gift from God and the Universe.

We have done nothing to deserve it, earn it, or purchased it. Like the air we breathe, time comes to us as a part of life.

This gift of time is not ours alone. It is given equally to every person. Rich and poor, educated and ignorant, strong and weak, every man, woman and child has the same twenty-four hours every day.

However, this gift comes with some conditions,

This gift of time can not be stopped. There is no way to slow it down, turn it off, or adjust it. Time moves on.

You cannot bring back time. Once it is gone, it is gone. Yesterday is lost forever. If yesterday is lost, then tomorrow is uncertain.

We may look ahead at a full year’s block of time, but we really have no guarantee that we will experience any of it.

Time is our most precious possession. We can waste it. We can worry over it.

Or we can spend it on ourselves. We can invest it in doing and making something productive for us and for the good of others we may be in contact with each and every day.

The new year is full of time. What will you do with it? As the seconds tick away, will you be throwing your gift of time out the window, or will you make every minute count?

May 2009 brings you lots of love, peace, health, wisdom, happiness and prosperity.

I welcome your comments click here to send me an email.

Copyright © 2008 – Daniel Morales, MBA

Daniel Morales is an international trainer, speaker and business consultant. He is currently Director for the San Gabriel Valley SBDC Small Business Development Center, Hosted by Mt. San Antonio College in Los Angeles, California. As a serial entrepreneur and small business owner, he provides real life practical training and consulting for hundreds of businesses each year. To find out how Daniel can help you create prosperity by achieving your business goals faster, you can contact him at www.danielmorales.com

Winning is a Management Strategy Game
by: Daniel Morales, MBA

During the Olympics games millions around the world watched athletes challenge themselves and each other. We saw them, both in athletic skills and professionalism. Not only did we get a chance to see sports performances but we also got a glimpse, through interviews and spotlight pieces, of the means that these athletes use to reach their best performances.

What does this have to do with you as a small business owner and entrepreneur? Two things.

First, an entrepreneur’s role is to lead people to aspire to be better, and to make anything appear possible. Perhaps we can gain insight into this process by learning from these athletes.

Second, entrepreneurs themselves can aspire to “winning management”, using some of the techniques of athletes to increase their personal management effectiveness.

Let’s take a look at four general techniques that small business owners can use to enhance their ability to deal with challenging situations.

Visioning Outcomes and Results

A gold medal swimmer indicated that part of his preparation included imagining standing on the gold medal podium and hearing his national anthem played loud over the speakers. This type of visioning, repeated over and over, becomes a central motivating force for overcoming obstacles, because it focuses you on the outcome and can be used as reward.

It makes the goal seem attainable, real and concrete provided that you visualize yourself in the picture, and that you paint a picture that engages all your feeling and your senses. What does it feel like? What are you hearing? What do you see? What do you smell?

A few examples. The entrepreneur who needs to do a stressful presentation, imagines that at the end, the audience is standing and applauding, a well deserved outcome. He or She imagines the sense of accomplishment, the sight of those people smiling. Or consider a manager who has to conduct a difficult performance review. He prepares by thinking about a successful outcome, shaking hands with the employee, as the employee smiles and thanks him for the help.

Rehearsal and Preparation

If you prepare for an event by actually carrying out the actions and behaviors, it is called practice. If you mentally run through the motions, it is called rehearsal. You are practicing in the mind. Fortunately, practicing in the mind can be done anywhere and can be as effective as doing it for real. However, mental rehearsal, as with results visioning, must be undertaken in detail, each step, action or word being imagined. The more vivid the picture painted, the better the results. Also, it is most effective if you imagine some obstacles, things that might go wrong, and imagine dealing successfully with them.

For examples. A business presentation rehearsal, where you run through in your head, what you will say, how you will say it, what you will look like while you are saying it, and what you will do if the overhead projector doesn’t work. Or a meeting with an irate client, where you prepare by anticipating his behavior, and rehearsing your own responses.

Skills Building and Training

All the visioning and rehearsal in the world can’t help you if you do not know what you were doing in the first place. You need to build your skills and aspire to continuous training and development, if you are going to improve. You need to learn. Read all you can. Talk to other managers about how they do things. Take courses and training opportunities. Ask peers and subordinates. Network with other people. And most important, reflect upon what you see and hear and learn. Even if it’s in the shower or driving to work. Sneak it in. Do it Daily.

Focus

One thing that stands out with olympic athletes is their ability to focus on their task and tune out other things. Imagine if you had to chair a staff meeting with 70,000 observers and 20 million T.V. watchers.

When faced with difficult tasks, you need to ensure that other things are not intruding on your thoughts. Part of this is mental discipline which is not easy for some to learn. Part is learning how to manage your environment. If you are faced with a challenge, make sure that you are not interrupted in your preparation for the challenge.

Focussing can be learned through mental disciplines such as meditation, or physical disciplines such as bodybuilding, cardiovascular exercises or certain martial arts. Learning relaxation techniques will also help your focusing abilities.

Summary

It may seem that these techniques should be particularly relevant for less experienced entrepreneurs, but, they are even more important for those who have more experience. That is because there is a tendency, after awhile, to stop developing and stop learning. When this happens a once successful small business owner may become an inept one. By consciously applying these techniques, you will begin to approach your peak performance levels at any task, and enhance your long term entrepreneurial effectiveness.

You are on your way to become an Olympic entrepreneur.

Got Comments?

I welcome your comments and experiences click here to send me an email.

Credits

Photo Courtesy of US Army by Robert Trubia taken February 20, 2002.
Spc. Jill Bakken holds flowers aloft and enjoys her moment of triumph after winning the gold in the first-ever women’s Olympic bobsled race Feb. 19. Her brakeman Vonetta Flowers is also being lifted by teammates after the race.

Copyright © 2008 – Daniel Morales
Daniel Morales is an international trainer, speaker and business consultant. He is currently Director for the San Gabriel Valley SBDC Small Business Development Center, Hosted by Mt. San Antonio College in Los Angeles, California. As a serial entrepreneur and small business owner, he provides real life practical training and consulting for hundreds of businesses each year. To find out how Daniel can help you create prosperity by achieving your business goals faster, you can contact him at www.danielmorales.com

Franklin was the youngest son and fifteenth child born to his working-class father and he only attended school for two years – but he made enough money to retire from active business by the age of 42.

How did he do it?

Well, it wasn’t by patenting his most famous invention, the lightning rod. In fact, Franklin didn’t patent any of his inventions or scientific discoveries, since he believed that everyone should be able to freely benefit from scientific progress. In his autobiography, he explained: “As we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.” In this way, he was sort of an eighteenth century open-source advocate.

Many people have tried to learn Franklin’s secrets to success from his bestseller, “The Way to Wealth,” which is still in print and has gone through more than thirteen hundred editions. The book compiles famous sayings such as, “A penny saved is a penny earned,” and “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” But although Franklin admired thrift and frugality all his life, he was only human and often found these ideals hard to live up to. He admitted in a letter to a friend, written at the end of his life, that although “frugality is an enriching virtue,” it was also “a virtue I could never acquire in myself.” But the next sentence points to one of the tricks we can learn from Franklin. He continues, “I was lucky enough to find it [frugality] in a wife, who thereby became a fortune to me.” As a teenager, Franklin had made friends with people who combined equal amounts of charisma with unreliability, but after being burned a few times, he made sure that the people in his life, from business partners to friends, embodied the qualities of industry, frugality, and dependability that he looked up to.

That’s one of Franklin’s tips for success, but to find the rest, we need to analyze his career as a printer. Despite his later fame as a scientist and diplomat, Franklin actually thought of himself first and foremost as a printer, all the way up to the end of his life. He was without a doubt one of the most successful printers of his time in America – and he provided an example of entrepreneurship we can learn from even today.

1. Franklin was ambitious, hardworking, and trustworthy

Printing is an industry with high capitalization costs, so Franklin needed support to get set up on his own. His honesty and ambition won him the confidence of friends with the resources to fund a print shop, and his diligence and work ethic made the business a success. In his autobiography, Franklin noted that he often worked past 11pm to get a job done, and that if necessary, he would stay overnight to redo it. In a town the size of Philadelphia, people quickly noticed this extra effort, and Franklin’s growing reputation lured customers away from his rivals.

2. Franklin was image conscious

Walter Isaacson, a Franklin biographer and former chairman of CNN, calls Ben Franklin “the country’s first unabashed public relations expert.” Franklin knew how useful a good reputation was, and cheerfully explained in his autobiography that he “took care not only to be in reality industrious and frugal, but to avoid all appearances of the contrary.” He then goes on to describe his carefully cultivated image, “I drest plainly; I was seen at no Places of idle Diversion; I never went out a-fishing or shooting; … and to show that I was not above my Business, I sometimes brought home the Paper I purchas’d at the Stores, thro’ the Streets on a Wheelbarrow.” By the end of the paragraph, Franklin’s competitor and former boss has been driven out of business and is reduced to “very poor Circumstances.” Franklin not only was hard-working and down-to-earth, he also made sure that everyone knew it, and as a result, he gained credibility and customers.

3. Franklin knew the value of networking

Even as a young tradesman, Franklin sought to improve himself and his community. He organized weekly meetings of a small group of other tradesmen and artisans, called a Junto. At their weekly meetings they asked how they “may be serviceable to mankind? to their country, to their friends, or to themselves?” In between establishing a university, hospital, lending library, militia, firefighting brigade, learned society, and insurance company, Franklin and his fellow Junto members sent plenty of business each other’s way.

At the age of thirty, by which time his Pennsylvania Gazette was the most widely read newspaper in the colonies, Franklin campaigned to be made clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly. This job was so boring that he often whiled away the time by making up mathematical puzzles, but it helped him make valuable connections. He used them to his advantage in bidding for lucrative government printing work.

4. Franklin took risks, but only very calculated risks

Job printing was a colonial printer’s bread and butter. Franklin, like his peers, could be relatively certain of his income from commissioned work, which included legal forms, contracts, licenses, sermons and pamphlets. But for bigger rewards, printers had to take bigger risks, by acting as publishers. Printing, as we’ve already noted, is a capital and labor intensive industry, and so a printer who published an entire edition of a book would tie up a lot of capital. If he misjudged his market, he could easily be left with a stack of unsold volumes on his hands. For that reason, printer-publishers tended to produce newspapers, one sheet “broadsides” on topical issues, and annual publications with predictable sales figures, such as almanacs. Franklin published all these types of material, but when his calculations convinced him that his investment in more daring ventures would be returned, he was prepared to take the risk. This resulted in several profitable bestsellers, but sometimes things still went wrong – for example, when he was left with an edition of the Psalms of David on his hands for two years!

5. Franklin came up with solutions that turned potential problems into silver linings.

Once an apprentice reached majority (usually at 21), they became journeyman printers, and were free to leave Franklin’s shop to set up business on their own, if they could find the seed capital. Rather than risk one of his journeymen finding the backing to become a local competitor, Franklin came up with a basic franchising idea. He provided trusted journeymen with the necessary equipment and materials to set themselves up as his printing partner in another colonial city, where there wasn’t yet a printing industry. They paid him back with one-third of their annual profits for the next six years – and they expanded Franklin’s market penetration, creating economies of scale that paved the way for bolder publishing ventures and more competitive pricing.

6. Franklin looked at the whole picture, guaranteeing supply, quality product, and distribution.

Franklin’s involvement in his industry spanned its entire range. His Pennsylvania Gazette and Poor Richard’s Almanacs were the most successful publications in the country, in large part due to Franklin’s witty conversational writing style. He had taught himself to write well by reading essays from The Spectator, taking notes, and then trying to rewrite the articles from scratch. But Franklin’s success didn’t derive from good content alone. He and his wife collected cotton rags (the raw material of paper), invested in setting up paper mills, and eventually ran a thriving wholesale paper business. Having tackled supply, Franklin moved on to distribution, spending years lobbying for the top post office job in the colonies. When he finally became deputy postmaster, he invested in increased efficiency, cutting the delivery time from Philadelphia to New York down to a day, and set up the first home-delivery system and the first dead letter office. Franklin also arranged for several of his friends and family to be named regional postmasters, thus expanding his publishing market and boosting his personal income. He was soon at the center of a sophisticated inter-colonial communications network, one of the most dynamic in the world.

7. Franklin was inventive – he thought “out of the box.”

Franklin came up with America’s first political cartoon, and printed Pamela, the first novel published in the colonies. He has also been inducted into the Direct Mail Order Hall of Fame, having pioneered the mail order catalogue as an inventive way to get rid of his back catalogue. However, Franklin also made sure that while he was innovating, he was still covering the more traditional bases to maintain customer comfort. He and Deborah ran a stationer’s shop on the side, stocking all sorts of sundries including fine chocolate. Meanwhile, his newspaper devoted ample column space to ever-popular gossip and sensational crimes.

8. Franklin identified unmet demands, created an awareness of them, and then often stepped forward to fill them.

Franklin saw the world around him in terms of how it could be improved upon, either by enhancing an existing tool, or by inventing a new solution altogether. This translated, in business terms, to not only seeing gaps in the market, but also coming up with creative ways to plug them. For example, Franklin noticed that almost a third of his fellow settlers in Pennsylvania were German-speakers, and promptly launched the Philadelphische Zeitung – the first newspaper printed in German in the colonies.

He also knew how to communicate his vision to others, often using his press as a vehicle for strategic public relations work. When the Pennsylvania Assembly was debating raising the limits on the amount of paper currency in the colony, Franklin wrote an anonymous pamphlet that swung the tide in favor, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency. He was then awarded the lucrative commission to print the currency, having also come up with an ingenious way to thwart counterfeiting by using unique leaf prints. And when Franklin’s friend, Dr. Thomas Bond, approached him to suggest that Philadelphia needed a hospital, Franklin immediately came up with the motivating concept of a matching funds donation, and wrote inspiringly in his Gazette about our shared moral duty to help the sick.

Franklin’s lifelong search for a better world did not always result in personal profit. Nonetheless, “doing well by doing good” remains the secret to his success, both as entrepreneur, and as human being.

This article was written by The Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary.
(c) Copyright 2006 by The Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary
“Used with Permission of The Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary”.
http://www.benfranklin300.com

A few years after I finished my MBA, I bought and became familiar with some of Ayn Rand books, I read “The Fountainhead” and then took on to read “Atlas Shrugged”. Unfortunately, I was not able to finish it. However, I kept a copy of the famous money speech by Francisco, it’s a classic.

I started to read the book again and while I do that, I want to share with you the famous ‘Money Speech’ from the book.

You have to read it a few times to really understand it. And once you really get it, it can save you a lot of money in financial education and personal development in understanding about abundance and prosperity.

This book will gain popularity in the next year due to several factors. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board took this book to heart and writes about the influence it had in his life when he read it in the early stages of his professional life. Next year, a movie is coming out in the theatres, Angelina Jolie is one of the main characters in the movie. The book turns 50 years this year.

Here below is the classic ‘Money’ speech from the book:

Francisco’s ‘Money’ Speech from -Atlas Shrugged-

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Original source: Part II, Section 2, pages 382-387 of the paperback (35th anniversary edition)
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Rearden heard Bertram Scudder, outside the group, say to a girl who made some sound of indignation, “Don’t let him disturb you. You know, money is the root of all evil – and he’s the typical product of money.”

Rearden did not think that Francisco could have heard it, but he saw Francisco turning to them with a gravely courteous smile.

“So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d’Aconia. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

“When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor – your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?

“Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions – and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

“But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made – before it can be looted or mooched – made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.

“To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except by the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss – the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery – that you must offer them values, not wounds – that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best your money can find. And when men live by trade – with reason, not force, as their final arbiter – it is the best product that wins, the best performance, then man of best judgment and highest ability – and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

“But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality – the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

“Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants; money will not give him a code of values, if he’s evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he’s evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

“Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth – the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve that mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

“Money is your means of survival. The verdict which you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men’s vices or men’s stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment’s or a penny’s worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you’ll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

“Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

“Or did you say it’s the love of money that’s the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It’s the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is the loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money – and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

“Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

“Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another – their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

“But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride, or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich – will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt – and of his life, as he deserves.

“Then you will see the rise of the double standard – the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money – the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law – men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims – then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

“Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion – when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

“Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it becomes, marked: ‘Account overdrawn.’

“When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, ‘Who is destroying the world?’ You are.

“You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it’s crumbling around you, while you’re damning its life-blood – money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men’s history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves – slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody’s mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer. Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers – as industrialists.

“To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money – and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man’s mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being – the self-made man – the American industrialist.

“If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose – because it contains all the others – the fact that they were the people who created the phrase ‘to make money’. No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity – to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.

“Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters’ continents. Now the looters’ credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide – as, I think, he will.

“Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns – or dollars. Take your choice – there is no other – and your time is running out.”