WHAT ARE YOUR RESOURCES?
Now that you know who you work for, you need to take an honest look at two things: what your resources are right now and where they can take you.
I currently drive an Audi A6. I love this car, and I love going on road trips in it. No matter the distance or destination, I know I’m going to get there, and I know I’ll travel in comfort. I can sing along with my favorite music on the satellite radio, and my biggest worry is that my speed will creep up to the point where I’ll get a ticket. Driving this car is an absolute pleasure!
My Audi A6 is dramatically different from what I drove in college. When my wife and I were first married, we drove a 1972 Dodge Colt that had been wrecked three times. I know people joke about cars that are held together with bailing wire and duct tape, but ours actually was. We tried to improve its appearance by covering up some of the larger dents with a rough coat of Bondo and then painting the entire car with blue spray paint. That plan didn’t work very well. In fact, I was so embarrassed by the car that when I was working on my MBA, I would park half a mile away so that no one would see what I drove. The car had a broken oil pan, and the head was cracked. It would get me to school and back, but I never dared take it out on the freeway, let alone on a road trip.
Back then, that was my only resource for getting to my destination. I can go a lot farther now in my Audi A6 than I could in that old Dodge Colt. But the Colt was better than my eight-year-old son’s current resources. He recently founded a business selling homemade crafts around the neighborhood. When he makes his deliveries, his mode of transportation is a kick scooter. So, while my Dodge Colt was constrained by the city limits, his radius is a few blocks from our home. But he is making do with the resources at his disposal. His vehicle is different from my Audi A6 and even my Dodge Colt. But it can still take him places.
Of course, the business he is building with his resources is dramatically different than the type of businesses I am able to build. But then, the businesses I build are dramatically different than the ones Donald Trump builds. Which is why he has a jet!
Obviously, we can go farther if we have a jet than if we just have a kick scooter. But any one of these vehicles will get us somewhere. We may have farther to go and more zigs and zags to create if we are starting with the kick scooter, but even when we think we have no resources, we actually do. Whatever your circumstances, it is important to look deep down in your pockets.
I grew up in a rural southern Utah town with a population of about 2,000, if you include the cows and chickens. My family did not have any worldly wealth to speak of. But I had dreams of going to college, succeeding as an engineer and businessman, and moving somewhere a bit bigger than my beloved hometown. When I was a young boy, my resources were the equivalent of my son’s kick scooter. They consisted mainly of sheer determination, the guts to move forward, time, and boundless energy. I also had a bicycle, which was handy because a nice neighbor who knew I wanted to work offered me a paper route. With that paper route, I was able to save enough money to fix up an old lawn mower that was sitting unused in our shed. After a bit of self-promotion, another neighbor offered me the job of mowing the hospital’s lawns. Between the paper route and the lawn mowing, I was able to buy more lawn mowers, and I invited my brothers to help mow other lawns. I kept a percentage of what they earned, which seemed fair because I was supplying the equipment. I saved most of the money I earned and put it toward my goal of going to college. I also worked hard in high school and received a scholarship, which added more resources toward my goal to graduate from college.
It may seem that I traveled in a fairly straight line toward my goal, but if you look more carefully, I did a lot of zigging and zagging. It may also seem that I had very limited resources, but let’s review them before arriving at that conclusion:
Determination
Time
Energy
Supportive parents
A bicycle
A neighbor who offered me a paper route
An old lawn mower in the shed
Money to fix the lawn mower
Knowledge to fix the lawn mower
Another neighbor who offered me the lawn-mowing job
Friends who wanted to mow lawns
Good grades, which led to a scholarship
I love speaking to young, enthusiastic college students. But whenever I talk about resources, one of them will say, “Rich, it’s great you’ve been able to start all these businesses, but look at where you are!” I then have to tell them that I had to climb the ladder, rung by rung, starting at the very bottom.
MENTAL CAPITAL
I value education. I grew up determined to graduate from college, and I did. Twice. First, I earned a bachelor’s degree in electronic engineering (which is not a major I would recommend if you want to sail through college), and second, I earned an MBA.
I give you this background because I don’t want you to misunderstand when I say that getting an MBA or any other degree is not mental capital. Information alone is not sufficient. I know enough “educated idiots” who are very book smart but are not able to put what they’ve learned to good use. Whether your sources of information are traditional or nontraditional, your mental capital is your ability to apply that information.
I learned things in my MBA program that have been of direct benefit—lessons having to do with finances, human resources, motivational philosophies, and so on. But the greatest benefits came from experiencing the discipline of learning—exploring, digging, experimenting, and applying. I made it a point to continue to explore and discover after I received my diploma, and I’ve learned some lessons since that have stayed with me far longer than the content I was tested on in the classroom.
As you assess your mental capital, by all means consider what you’ve learned in school, but also consider what you’re good at. What special skills do you have that you could apply to your current situation? What are you curious about? Do you have unique insight or understanding about a particular field?
For me, I think I have some natural ability as a salesman, which helped me convince my brothers to mow lawns for me. I’m good at understanding technology, something I was aware of when I set out to repair that old lawnmower in my parents’ garage. Both are forms of mental capital I’ve continued to use to this day. Somewhere in my career, I became adept at search-engine optimization, or making sure websites show up at the top of the list you see when you push “search.” That knowledge didn’t exist when I graduated from college, but I picked it up along the road and it’s paid big dividends.
I have an acquaintance who had a solid career in print journalism at the time personal computers first made their appearance back in the early 1980s. Like everyone around him, he had to learn a new set of skills. Some of his coworkers balked at the changes this new technology was bringing to the newsroom and did as little as humanly possible to adapt. But Bob got excited, learned all he could, dug deeper than most, then kept digging, and today oversees a vast and complex website for an international organization.
I know another man who didn’t quite finish his degree in graphic design, in part because he needed to get a job to support a growing family. He had worked for a small television station as a student and was able to get on full-time when he dropped out of college. Rather than feeling he was at a dead end, though, he taught himself everything he could about a technology that was shifting from analog to digital and from standard definition to high definition. Soon he became indispensable to the organization, and a few years later he caught the eye of a major television studio that needed someone who could keep pace with systems that change almost daily. It was not a degree that got him this higher paying job, it was his mental capital.
Sometimes our schools present learning as a straight line: you learn this, you pass the test on that, you get your diploma, you get your first job, and you move up the ranks. But identifying and applying our mental capital will inevitably lead us to zigs and zags throughout our lives, if we are willing to open our eyes to our potential and to the possibilities that lie before us.
Passion is a vital form of mental capital. It not only drives us, but it gets people aligned with us as we pursue our goals. In my professional pursuits, I am passionate about technology and about building businesses. Now, technology can be a pretty dry subject, but I can almost guarantee you I’ll bring so much passion to any discussion we have that you’ll find yourself fascinated before long. Recently, I was given one hour to meet with an internationally known figure to discuss a technology I thought might benefit him. The one hour he agreed to turned into four hours, and at the end of our discussion he introduced me to his colleagues by proclaiming, “This is the coolest geek I’ve ever met!”
Your passions will be different from mine. But find them. Make sure your own fire is burning brightly, and others will see it and support you in your pursuits.
RELATIONSHIP CAPITAL
If you take your smarts and your intelligence and do nothing but sit in a dark room and think about how bright you are, then obviously nothing is going to come of them. But if you take your smarts and your intelligence and use them to the benefit of people around you, the relationships you build will propel you toward your goals. Likely, you won’t find yourself traveling in a straight line, but, even with twists and turns, you’ll get there.
While I was still in college, I worked in technical support for a startup company named Netline. Everyone in the company was busting their guts to make this little leading-edge technology business work, and we had advanced to the point where we had attracted the attention of a billionaire who was coming to see if he wanted to invest in the company.
The day before he was to arrive, we set up a demo wall and prepared everything needed to show him the technology. I was just a peon in this company, but as I was getting ready to leave that night, I noticed our cement floor had not been swept or mopped, and the place was filthy. We were a startup, and we were so focused on the technology that those small details were overlooked. But I guess I had learned enough from my mother to feel embarrassed to have this incredibly successful businessman see our offices looking as they did.
So I drove home and got my wife, and we went back and cleaned the building. As it happened, everyone was gone by the time we started, and the next day I didn’t feel any need to point out what we had done.
We made our presentation to the businessman, he was impressed with the technology, and the company got the funding it needed. As we celebrated, there was a buzz about who had cleaned the building; and even though I didn’t say anything, someone figured out who had corrected a glaring oversight. As simple as my contribution was, it created relationship capital with the vice president of marketing, who asked me to be his technician. Before long, he was promoting me within the company and inviting me to travel with him to trade shows.
I didn’t have much mental capital at that point, but—without even intending to do so—I formed relationships that have lasted for years, simply by knowing which end of a broom to hold on to.
Several years ago I traveled to Lake Tahoe to deliver a lecture. Before the appointed time, I had the opportunity to meet with a group of about 20 young entrepreneurs from Canada who had asked if I’d spend an hour with them answering questions on starting businesses.
We had a delightful exchange, and, as we got to the end of our time together, they asked me what they could do to help me. Not thinking anything about it, I said something like, “Oh, everything’s good. Thanks for the offer.” As I was heading to the presentation I had come to make, one of my associates told me we had misplaced the handouts we were going to use. He was a little panicked and was hoping we could find a copy machine in time to make new copies.
The next thing that I knew, Ernistina, one of the young Canadians, had gathered her team together. They figured out where to make the photocopies and then took the time to hand them out to the group of people who were gathered in the lecture hall. Because of her awareness and service, the event went off without any glitches and was a success. I was so grateful to Ernistina that I instantly invited her to a seminar we were teaching on entrepreneurship. We, of course, waived the tuition and even helped with her travel expenses.
Ernistina certainly hadn’t met with me with the plan that she could then turn her energies toward making photocopies, and I can only assume that she had other things to do after we finished our discussion. But by being willing to serve me, she was able to expand her relationship capital considerably. And I was able to make a new friend.
Building networks of relationships does not happen overnight, and it takes attentiveness and hard work. I’ve seen people who set out with a very clear goal to build a network as quickly as possible. They see their goal, and they see others as a way to reach the goal. And they often bulldoze straight ahead, leaving expendable bodies in their wake. Some of the greatest relationships I’ve been fortunate to enjoy have come at the end of zigzagging that took place over months and even years—and could never have been envisioned if I had sat down and tried to map out who I needed to know and where knowing them would get me.
As part of my MBA program while I was still working at Novell, I had the opportunity to go on a trip through Asia to study various businesses in Japan, Korea, and China. When I returned, Mitsubishi had just signed a contract with Novell for some strategic engineering work. As it happened, I was the only one in our department who had ever been to Japan. So, even though I did not speak the language, I got assigned to be the strategic engineer for Mitsubishi.
During this time the president of Mitsubishi’s PC Division, Dr. Peter Horne, traveled from Japan to Utah several times to meet with Novell’s CEO, Ray Noorda. My job was to pick him up at the Salt Lake City airport and drive him to our Provo office, which was about an hour away. I suppose I could have viewed this assignment as something of a chore, but I chose to see it as an opportunity to get to know a very bright, talented, capable individual. So, I washed my car (thank goodness, I had recently traded up from the Dodge Colt!) and tried to think of some interesting topics of conversation.
Dr. Horne and I had made the same trip several times when something happened that changed my life. As he climbed into my car on a Wednesday afternoon for another trip back to the airport, Dr. Horne tossed his jacket into the back seat of my car, unbeknownst to me. When we pulled up to the terminal, he grabbed his luggage but inadvertently left his jacket behind. I drove home, dropped off the car for my wife, and then got a ride to a Boy Scout activity I was helping to chaperone.
This was before cell phones, and while I was gone my wife got a frantic call from Dr. Horne letting her know that he had failed to retrieve his jacket and that his passport and wallet were in its pockets. Without a second thought, my wife loaded our three kids (all under the age of six) into the car and drove like crazy up to the airport. My wife and these little kids ran through the airport as fast as they could in order to get the jacket to Dr. Horne before his flight took off. (If you can remember ancient history, this was before the days of airport security.)
A few weeks later my wife received a package in the mail with a beautiful hand-carved jewelry box and a thank-you note. In the note Dr. Horne commented that his wallet had contained a substantial amount of cash and that not one cent had been touched. He expressed amazement that we would have the integrity to return his wallet without even looking inside. He was also grateful that my wife would drive up, even though it was clearly an inconvenience. In a subsequent conversation, Dr. Horne told me that if I ever decided to leave Novell, he would like to talk with me. Indeed, the time did come when I left Novell, and through a series of fortuitous events I became the general manager of Mitsubishi Electrics PC Division in the United States. Meeting Dr. Horne was one of the first real breaks I had during the early years of my career. What started out as a small act of service on my wife’s part was rewarded with a strong mentor, boss, and a dear friend. I will be forever grateful to Dr. Peter Horne.
Building relationships is an important and never-ending opportunity that will set the foundation for your zigzagging. It will open more doors for you than you could ever imagine. It’s also a process that needs to be looked at from the right perspective. I would recommend that you remember two important principles: First, do the right things for the right reasons. Second, don’t ever use people.
We live in a selfish world where some people believe the world stopped revolving around the sun on the day they were born. Some have the mindset that everyone but themselves is disposable and that they can just burn through as many people as necessary to get where they’re going. My experience and observations have taught me repeatedly that a far better way to live is to have a genuine concern for others and seek ways to serve those around you. That said, our motivation should never be anything other than doing the right thing.
I recall one young man who I was eager to help. He was incredibly bright and talented, and I saw a lot of potential in him. On several occasions I put myself out there to help him. When I was leaving the department where I had been his boss, I made sure he had a good position. A few weeks later, he complained to me that he was not happy in his new job and was looking for another. I opened my network of friends to him and helped him find new employment. A couple of months later he had burned through those relationships, and I found myself having to apologize to close associates for the messes he had created. I recommended him for several other jobs and offered my advice whenever he called. I even helped him get into a prestigious MBA school.
I never received a thank-you from him, nor any offer to reciprocate for the help I had given him. In fact, one time I asked a very small favor of him, but he was too busy. Another time I overheard him pointing out some of my weaknesses to a group of associates. We should not help others with an eye toward what we can get in return, but when all we get back is a lack of gratitude and a sense of being used, that becomes burdensome. In this case, though my “friend” continued to call for help from time to time, I simply quit responding to his demands and returning his calls. No one likes to feel used.
APPLICATION
Wherever you are and whatever you plan to do, you’ll benefit from making a list of the resources you have at your disposal. Start with what you have today and dig deep down into your pocket. Look for resources that you might otherwise overlook.
VALUE EQUATION
MENTAL CAPITAL + RELATIONSHIP CAPITAL = FINANCIAL CAPITAL
