Hey Home Party Consultants!

In the many consultations I give, there is a common thread, too many people are sooo afraid of letting go of a dollar, in order to gain their freedom.

What is tax? It is a penalty for parked money. You do no get taxed for money in flow. That is why the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer.

My rich dad also says there is only two things in investing, time and money. Now most people are really afraid of losing money. They are so afraid of losing money that they do not invest time or money into anything else. You can always make the money back. You can lose money, but you can always make money back but you can never make time back. The issue here is time and how you invest that time wisely. Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Plan, Poor Plan

Know this, all that glitters is not gold. Allow me to illustrate!

You know what a monkey trap is? An interesting system has been used for capturing monkeys in the jungles of Africa. The goal is to take the monkeys alive and unharmed for shipment to zoos of America. Just like it is your goal to get your home party recruits alive, money in hand ready to buy in an honest and humane fashion.

In an extremely humane way, the captors use heavy bottles, with long narrow necks, into which they deposit a handful of sweet-smelling nuts. Alternatively, the monkey hunters drill a hole in a coconut, just big enough for a monkey to stick in his hand and arm, so long as the hand is open and extended. However, if the hand is in a fist, it cannot enter or come out. The bottles and coconuts are dropped on the jungle floor, and the captors return the next morning to find a monkey trapped next to each bottle or coconut in hand.

The monkey hunters put a worthless shiny stone in the coconut, big enough to ensure the monkey’s hand cannot come out while clinching the stone. The monkey is curious. He is attracted to the shiny object he spots inside the hole. Sticks in his hand and grasps the shiny, worthless pebble. Now he is possessive. He won’t let go. The coconut is anchored to the tree. The monkey hunters come. The monkey is screaming in fear, but he is captured, because he is holding onto a shiny, worthless pebble which becomes more important to him than his freedom.

How is it accomplished? The monkey, attracted by the aromatic scent of the nuts, comes to investigate the bottle, the nuts, and is trapped. The monkey can’t take its hand out of the bottle as long it’s holding the nuts, but it is unwilling to open its hand and let them go. The bottle is too heavy to carry away, so the monkey is trapped.

We may smile at the foolish monkeys, but how often we hold to our problems so tenaciously as the monkeys hold to the nuts in the bottle. And so, figuratively we carry our bottle around with us, feeling very sorry for ourselves, and begging for sympathy from others, even from God.
This morning I’m lying in my hotel room asking myself - what ideas, concepts or attachments do I need to be willing to give up in order to allow myself to grasp a bigger and better concept? What do I have to be willing to let go? I like to think of myself as a pretty logical person, devoid of superstition, and dismissive of mythology. But I know that I get very attached to my ideas, my opinions. Sometimes it’s hard to let go of tightly-held ideas but, unless we do, we don’t grow.

One idea I let go of a couple of years ago was that I had to earn an income. It was a major revelation to me when I realized that if I sold all of my assets, I could afford to live quite comfortably for several years while I built a start-up business. I let go of the idea that I needed to cling on to the assets I had gained, like those spider monkeys. And it was one of the best things I ever did.