RTG Episode 7

In this episode, the speaker discusses the concept of "Robbing the Graveyard," which means living your best life and leaving a legacy of wealth, knowledge, and health for future generations. The speaker emphasizes the importance of setting oneself apart and being different in order to achieve success. They explain that wealth is enduring while riches are fleeting, and provide examples of the difference between being rich and being wealthy. The speaker encourages listeners to maximize their potential and strive to live their best life, rather than settling for mediocrity. The episode concludes with the advice to show up, be on time, and be reliable, as these simple actions can set one apart from the majority of people. Welcome to episode seven of Rob the Graveyard. My name is Terry Bryan, and I want to thank you for accompanying us on this journey. And by now you have the gist of what it means to Rob the Graveyard. And when you get to the bottom of it, Robbing the Graveyard is essentially living your best life. It's about being the best that you can be. And as a result, you'll be able to reach your ultimate destiny and achieve your major purpose in life. In doing so, you'll be able to leave a legacy for your progeny, that is your children and your grandchildren, a legacy of wealth. And when I speak of wealth, I'm referring not only to financial wealth, but also to a wealth of wisdom, understanding, knowledge, and health as well. Because these are all essential things that will be needed for your progeny to perpetuate or pass on your gift throughout the generations. And this, my friends, is the ultimate in paying it forward. But realize that if you're not educated, and more importantly, if they're not educated and trained on how to preserve it, they'll blow it or simply just lose it for sure. And that's what it's all about, remember. Generational wealth, passing it on. So in this episode, we'll discuss an essential element that's required for you to get the job done. Ladies and gentlemen, and that is that you need to set yourself apart. You need to set yourself apart. What I mean is that you have to be different. Different is good. By being a grip rubber, you are inherently different. It even sounds different. Go and tell someone that you are a grip rubber and see how they look at you before you explain what it means. I once read a book by Dennis Kimbrell, and he summed it up succinctly. You may have heard about a book called Think and Grow Rich, written by Napoleon Hill. Very famous book, especially among entrepreneurs. Well, Dennis Kimbrell wrote a version called Think and Grow Rich, A Black Choice. And instructively, remember what he said, it's a choice. See, because success and progress in life and achievement is a choice, you just have to make that choice to do it. What he wrote in his book was that if you want to be successful, all you have to do is the opposite of most people. In other words, all you need to do is to do the opposite of what most people do. And I think he was talking about 95% of people, if I'm not mistaken. But I would take it a little bit further. If you really want to be successful in terms of robbing the graveyard, because you see, we have to define what success is. Success means different things to different people. For us being grave robbers, our level of success is going to be a little bit different, because we don't just want to have money and be rich. We want to be wealthy, because riches are fleeting. They're here today sometimes and gone tomorrow. What you want to do is that you want to be in that top 2% of people. You want to be able to do the opposite of what 98% of people do, because there's a percentage, maybe that 3% between 35 and 98, they may become rich for a period of time, and then lose it all. So some people define success as having money. But I'll tell you what, in our definition of robbing the graveyard, being good or being rich is not what we strive for. What we strive for is to maximize our potential, to live our best life, not our good life, but our best life. You walk down the street and you choose any hundred people, or even pick out any hundred people you know, if you know that many people, and you'll be hard pressed to find two people who are robbing the graveyard. You may find even five who are successful, or rich as they call it, but remember the difference is that wealth is enduring, rich is fleeting. And so you'll be able to find maybe five who are rich, but you'll probably only find two who are robbing the graveyard. Two who are wealthy, who possess generational wealth that can be passed on to generations. I'll give you an example. When we look at something that we all know about football, compare football players who are rich to team owners who are wealthy. See, the team owners, they possess generational wealth. They pay the players. You see, because the players can be rich today, like I said, and be poor in five years. Studies have shown by people such as Sports Illustrated that 60% of all football players are broke within five years of leaving the league. I mentioned this before. I want you to think about something. There's an owner, well a former owner of a team, Washington Redskins. He was cited for bad behavior and the teams, the members of the ownership of the NFL teams, they forced him out. He came in, I think he bought the team for somewhere around $700 million a number of years ago, maybe even less than that. I'm not sure of the exact figure, but no, he's selling for over $6 billion. Think about that. See, that's generational wealth. Even though he's kicked out, he leaves with generational wealth. When a player is kicked out for bad behavior, what does he leave with? The money he'd already made, that's it. And hopefully he does have some in a lot of cases because they live above their means or right at their means. If they are kicked out, they leave with nothing or very little. That's the difference between somebody who's rich and somebody who's wealthy. Because the riches are fleeting, the wealth is enduring. So for us being grave robbers, people who want to rob the graveyard, we're not just looking to be good. We're looking to be great. We're looking to leave generational wealth. We're looking to be the best that we can be. And that's the difference. See, because we don't want to take our, talent to the grave. We want to maximize it. You see, I listened to a speaker, God rest his soul, Zig Ziglar, who spoke on this and he touched on it in a different manner. He talked about mediocrity. He was giving a speech and he was talking about a guy who was responding to him and the guy was saying, well, who are you calling mediocre? I am a multimillionaire. I've done this. I've done that. I've done the next. All these things he's done. And Zig Ziglar's response was, believe for you, I still say mediocre. And what he was referring to the fact that he may have achieved all of these different things, but he did not maximize his potential. He did not do the best he could do. And that's the point I'm trying to make to you. You see, some people could become successful in the eyes of others, but did they rob the graveyard? Are they living their best life? Not are they living a good life or even they might be living a great life, but are they living their best life? That's the difference. You see, people have different levels of potential and different levels of ability. Our job is to maximize our potential and live and use the maximum amount of our ability so that we can achieve our ultimate destiny in life and reach our ultimate potential. Achieve our major purpose in life. That's what it's all about. So when you look around you, you look at the people you know and you examine yourself. Remember I spoke about self-reflection. Are you doing the best you can do? Are you an intelligent student who is just getting B's because you're being lazy and you're not putting enough effort? Or are you a regular average ordinary student who is getting A's or maybe even B's because you are doing the best that you can do? That's the difference. Mediocrity is often a reflection of the effort you put in or the lack thereof. So you want to be in that 2% of the 100 that I spoke about. The two out of the 100 that you may meet or you may know, you want to be in that 2%. Not just being rich, but being wealthy. And remember, it's all around wealth. It is wealth that includes a wealth of wisdom, understanding, knowledge, health, and wealth. I spoke earlier about the fact that life is full of contradictions. And here is one that you may find interesting. As human beings, we always want to think that we're different. But are most of us really different? That's the question. We often say to other people, don't compare me to X, Y, Z, I'm different. Because naturally and intrinsically, we understand that difference is good. But yet we criticize those who are different. And we often also get upset when someone else calls us weird even, because we act differently. These are all contradictions. We want to be different when it suits us, but we don't want to be labeled as different when it embarrasses us. You have to make a difference, a decision, I should say. You have to understand who you are. Remember, we talked about that too. Knowing who you are and being comfortable with yourself. See, because I've had people tell me I'm weird. I've even had somebody ask me if I was even human because of the way how I responded to different things or how I acted and behaved. People see it and saw it as different. But I didn't have a problem with it because I don't want to be like everybody else. If you're like everybody else, you're like the other 35 or 35% over there, actually the 98%. And that's not what we're striving to be. So here are a few things I will tell you and I will share with you that can set you apart. That's what this episode is about. It's about setting yourself apart. And I'll start with an easy one. In life, you should show up and be on time. That's a very simple thing to do. You must be reliable and do what you say. Be reliable and do what you say you're going to do. Because most people don't. 98% of people don't. You see, in life, you can beat 80% of people just by showing up. How many times you heard people say they want to come or they want to do this and they're going to do that and they never show up and they never do it or they never do it. You beat 80% of people just by showing up and doing what you say you're going to do. And you beat another 5% by being on time. So you beat 85% of all competition, all other people there, by just showing up and showing up on time. You beat 85% of people. And if you show up on time with a plan, oh man, you now beat 90% of the people. Now you're really in good reason. And then if you add some hard work on top of that, you've beaten 95% of people. So think about that. If you just show up on time with a plan and work hard at it, you have just put yourself in the top 5% now. You've just beaten 95% of people and then the rest of it is just competing to be the best of the best. That's how you end up in the top 2%. That's an easy one to master. The other thing you can do that can help set you apart is to be credible, be honest and trustworthy. That's another easy one, right? Just be honest and trustworthy. Be someone that when you say something, people can believe what you say and you can believe what you say. See, because I don't have to try to remember what I said because I'm always telling the truth. And I tell the truth for different reasons. Quite frankly, one of the reasons I tell the truth is because I don't care what anybody else says or thinks. And the other thing is that I don't care enough about what people think about me to be worried about lying to them. You know, and I started that actually at an early age. You know, I remember once the biggest argument or problem I had with my father when I was growing up is that one day my stepmother told him something that I said that I didn't. She told a lie on me and he questioned me about it. And I said to him, you know what? You ought to know me by now. I will tell you or anybody else what I have to tell you and I ain't gonna lie about it. And he and I didn't speak for a while, but he understood. He was just a little embarrassed because he had previously told me that if there's one thing I notice about you, Terry, that I can trust you, that you're reliable in what you say and what you say you're gonna do. So he was heading up the wrong road and that's how you need to be. You need to be honest and trustworthy to the point where when you say something, people know it's true and they can rely on it. And that will set you apart from most people. Another thing you should do and you probably will be very, very, you will reap a lot of great benefits from this is to be a good communicator. That will also set you apart. Learn to communicate effectively and that starts with listening. See, God gave us two ears and one mouth, but we often like to talk a lot and listen only a little. But we should listen more and talk less. See, because if you listen to people, it will give you a great idea of what they're thinking and what they're feeling. And then you can respond appropriately. So start listening more and speaking less and that's a great way to learn how to communicate with people effectively. And also, learn how to express yourself well. I'm not talking about using highfalutin words. I'm talking about being able to say succinctly and clearly what you need to say in a way that the audience can understand. Know your audience. That's another good part, another part of being a good communicator. Knowing your audience, know who you're speaking to, knowing what they are expecting of you. And be patient. Use effective words and be patient with people with their different levels of understanding. In other words, you have to see other people. You have to understand their feelings, understand where they're coming from. Because a lot of people, they talk past the audience. They don't see the audience. They don't see the people, the individual people. So you have to learn how to decipher that within people. And if you can do that, they will trust you and they will follow you. And finally for the day, the last thing we're gonna talk about to help set you apart from others is that as a business person, but I know most of the people listening to this type of podcast are business people. And business people negotiate a lot. That's part of what we do. So when you negotiate, negotiate from a position of strength. In other words, don't beg, barter. Because oftentimes when we have a scarcity of resources, or whether we had, what do I call, an unfortunate circumstance in our life, or we are less advantaged, we go to people thinking that they should do things for us because we are less advantaged. You know, and I'm a black person, and as black people, sometimes we think that America owes us something, or maybe even white people owe us something, or the government owes us something. Well, whether or not that is true, the one thing I can tell you that's true is that they won't wanna hear that. They don't wanna hear that. And they'll frown upon you when you approach them in that manner. When you go to people to negotiate for something, bring something to the table. That's what I mean when I say negotiate from a position of strength. Okay, you have that, and I have this. How can I provide for you some of what I have that you need so I can get some of what you need that I want? And we negotiate to see what's fair and beneficial for both parties. That is how you approach negotiations. Don't come to me and say, well, you know what, I don't have this, or I don't have that, so you should give it to me because I'm lesser advantaged. That's not the answer. You find something of value to bring to the table, and you offer that in exchange for what you are looking to get. That's negotiating from a position of strength. A position of strength because you have something that they want, or you have something of value that can be beneficial to them, and then they're likely to listen to you and hear you then. But if you go looking for a handout, it's not gonna happen. Those are a few things that I want to share with you that will help you to be able to set yourself apart from others. We're gonna stop there today and try to keep this down to 20 minutes, and we're gonna move on to some other topics later. But think about the things that I've said today. Maybe it can help you to move forward and do better, help you to rob the graveyard. And remember, to rob the graveyard is to maximize your potential. Use your God-given talent to achieve your ultimate purpose in life, and not, never take your talent with you to the grave. That's it for episode seven, and we're gonna, remember, we can be found on Spotify, we can be found on Apple, Google, pretty much every podcast platform out there, you can find us. Just type in Rob the Graveyard, and you'll be able to find us. And also, by the way, follow us on our YouTube channel, which is also titled Rob the Graveyard, and give us your feedback. Let us know what you think, how we're doing, and we'll see you on the next podcast, episode eight.