The Big Education Lie

Parents fall for this lie every time. 

Society convinces every new generation of families that education is the #1 solution for all of their kids problems and so they set their priorities accordingly. They believe the overwhelming key for their kids to have a great, stable and successful life is education!

Education, Education, Education! Above all things get educated and you’ll be set for life. 

Education is the key. Go to school, do your homework, get your diploma and the job is done preparing you for life as a responsible, productive, independent adult.

The truth is…NO IT'S NOT!

Millions of highly educated people, young and old, have plunged their lives into disaster by poor choices. 

You want examples? They are everywhere in all countries and all walks is life and more new ones show up on the news everyday. 

Bernie Madoff ripping off thousands of trusting investors- even his own relatives, Tiger Woods at the peak of fulfillment in live throwing it all away for a little extra forbidden pleasure, brokers on Wall Street snorting cocaine, Enron executives building a global company on total fraud and deceit, T.V. evangelists caught with prostitutes, female high school teachers running off with 13 year old boys…do I really need to add anymore?

It’s not what you know, it’s what you do with it. The source of all these disasters is lack of values and character. These must be taught. 

No two year old is going to have their first words be “yes ma’am” or “yes sir.” When they hit the Earth and gain consciousness, sight, mobility, and the ability to speak, they go right to work trying to organize the world for their benefit. 

The first word many babies say—announcing their presence in the world is…”NO!” They are totally self-centered, and why shouldn’t they be? They’re not independent yet and need others to take care of them.

It’s all about them. That changes when you go out into the real world. Now you’re supposed to be independent and take care of yourself. Jobs, marriage, and having children demand that you focus on doing things for others. Without character and values you can’t resist the temptations to take short cuts for extra pleasure, extra money, and extra glory. And you’ll do it even if it involves breaking laws, breaking confidences, or destroying relationships.

Kids need to be taught right from wrong. Kids need be taught respect for authority. They need to be taught respect for others. This isn’t going to happen by itself, and if it isn’t done it won’t matter what education they have. They will have knowledge but they won’t have a foundation. You can build a building but without a firm foundation, it’s just a matter of time before it crumbles.

Make sure your kids get a great education but also make sure they have a firm foundation of values and character to stand on as they go through life.  

Question: How about you? Do you know any very smart people who have done some very dumb things?

"I Had Confidence in One Thing"

Dive in with confidence and focus. Now isn't the time to flounder.Young Brett Burks had a problem.

After graduating from college he dove head first into starting his own financial services company. He spent a good amount of time apprenticing the business, getting all the licenses and mastering the basics. He was excited and successful. Eventually he branched out on his own.

In spite of overwhelming odds, he not only got his new business off the ground, he built it into a national leader! His life was set. He had paid the price of starting up a new business and now he was looking forward to a lifetime of rewards. Sure, he would continue to work hard but the nasty, scary and round-the-clock start up phase was behind him.

Until he went to a January convention.

That’s when he met the bubbly and beautiful Andrea. She was perfect! AND she also was already involved in the same business. Young love! PERFECT love!  Except as we all know, life doesn’t work that way. Andrea is from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida—a long way from Virginia where Brett had gone to school and lived. She wasn’t moving. Brett realized if they were going to have a life together it would have to be in Ft. Lauderdale.

He now faced the problem - he would have to put himself through another start up. This time it would be even more difficult since he knew no one there and had never lived there - no familiar stomping grounds. He swallowed hard and decided to move. In 90 days, he and Andrea had made a breakthrough and things started to compound.

Three years after the move their team had grown larger than the one he left behind. Their income exploded as well and they earned well over $1 million in that third year.

I asked Brett what was going through his mind when he made his move.

I knew it had to be nerve wracking for him because when you start something new, you can never be sure how successful it will be. And this time he knew how much work he was getting into since he had just done it.

I wanted to know what gave him the confidence to go. He told me he had total confidence in one thing.

“I was sure of one thing and that gave me confidence. I was confident that I would do WHATEVER it took for as long as it took to win. That took all the insecurity away. I had done it before and I knew I could do it again if I paid the price.”

Talk about a winning attitude!

You win when you do 2 things: 

1. Stop worrying about all the things that can go wrong 

2. Focus on what you can do and to commit to do it until you win. 

Brett did exactly that and it paid off for him big-time.

The Real World

When you hear the phrase, "Welcome to the real world," what does that mean? 

What does it mean when you go from elementary school to junior high, to high school, to college, to marriage, to careers, to maybe even a business of your own? At any stage along the way you may hear the phrase, "Welcome to the real world.”  So what does that mean?

What's different about the real world?

A lot of things, but here are a few. Things happen faster. It's like going from a country road to the interstate, there's a lot more people in a lot bigger hurry. Another thing is intensity. There's a lot more on the line.  It's in the area of personal responsibility. You no longer have people looking out for you, encouraging you on, like you did in the past.  Now you're surrounded by people competing in the same arena, trying to move up just like you. Things that you do are not assignments for school, are not chores around the house, they involve helping a company become profitable or helping a company even survive.  The intensity, the importance of delivery is much, much higher. 

The support structure is different.  
There is less emotional support. It's cold blooded. It's everyone for themselves. It's finding that people don't really care what happens to you because they don't have time, they don't have the luxury. They're concerned about surviving themselves. They may be sympathetic, they may be sad if you fail, they probably will be, but they can't stop what they're doing to console you for very long because they've got to survive themselves.  

That's why people say it's more cutthroat, more cold blooded. It’s just everybody's trying to survive. You don't have parents at work. You don't have parents on the football field with you. It doesn't work that way. Welcome to the real world. What does that mean? 

It means you are going it alone and you're going fast and it's up to you to look out for you.

Winners Book Club Selection Of The Week: Paula Deen: It Ain't All About the Cookin'

WHAT ARE HER “WINNER” CREDENTIALS? 

Paula Deen: It Ain't All About the Cookin' is the personal memoir of Paula Deen. She's a huge success, inspiration and icon to millions in multiple arenas. She worked her way to the top inspire of tremendous competition. She has written many popular books, has her own magazine and is a star of the Food Network where she has had several hit television shows. She has overcome many tragedies and setbacks in her life and has helped millions deal with adversity by her example.

Who is Paula Deen? AMAZON answers...

You may think you know the butter-loving, finger-licking, joke-cracking queen of melt-in-your-mouth Southern cuisine. You may have even visited The Lady & Sons to taste for yourself the down-home delicacies that made her famous and even heard some version of her Cinderella story (a single mom with two teenage sons started a brown-bag lunch business with $200 and wound up with a thriving restaurant, a fairy-tale second marriage, and wildly popular television shows), but you have never heard the intimate details of her often bumpy road to fame and fortune.

Courageously honest, downright inspiring, and just a little bit saucy, Paula shares the highs and lows of her life in the inimitable charming and irreverent style that you know from her television shows and personal appearances. She talks about long childhood summers spent in a bathing suit and roller skates and hard years living in the back of her father's gas station; a buzzing high school social life of sleepovers, parties, cheerleading, and boys; and a difficult marriage. The death of her beloved parents precipitated a debilitating agoraphobia that crippled her for years. But even when the going got tough, Paula never lost the good grace and sense of humor that would eventually help carry her to success and stardom. Of course, you can't get by on charm alone: as Paula has learned, you need plenty of willpower, hard work.

In this memoir, Paula Deen speaks as frankly and intimately as few women in the public eye have ever dared. Whether she's telling tales of good times or bad, her story is proof that the old-fashioned American dream is alive and kicking, and there still is such a thing as a real-life happy ending. 

Amazon Editorial Reviews

Anyone who's ever watched, mesmerized, as the author of this memoir pan-fries a porkchop on the Food Network will find lots to savor in her down-home life story. Deen, the sunny host of Paula's Home Cooking and the author of three cookbooks, relates the collapse of her first marriage, her surprising fight with agoraphobia and the rise of her Savannah restaurant, The Lady and Sons, with candor, good humor and mouthwatering descriptions of Southern food. Of her husband's favorite dish, Sexy Oxtails, Deen writes, "It is a loving dish; a hearty, lip-smacking dish; and those tails are better than a passionate kiss." Yes, she includes the simple, savory recipe alongside recipes for favorites like belly-filling Shaggy Man Split Pea Soup, salty-sweet Pan-Fried Corn and addictive Biscuits and Sawmill Gravy. Deen writes the way she talks-lots of ain'ts, darlings and honeys-but the effect is charming and disarmingly upfront. On her early Food Network success, she says, "I was not a size 2, but instead a sassy, roundish, white-headed cook. Women could identify with me... I could be them, and they could be me." She's absolutely right; when Deen has turned the last of life's lemons into Southern-sweet lemonade, readers may want to stand up and cheer, or maybe just tuck into a big, celebratory plate of porkchops.