Planting The Seed

A successful business man was growing old and knew it was time to
choose a successor to take over the business.

Instead of choosing one of his Directors or his children, he decided
to do something different. He called all the young executives in his
company together.

He said, "It is time for me to step down and choose the next CEO. I
have decided to choose one of you. "The young executives were Shocked,
but the boss continued. "I am going to give each one of you a SEED
today - one very special SEED. I want you to plant the seed, water it,
and come back here one year from today with what you have grown from
the seed I have given you.
I will then judge the plants that you bring, and the one
I choose will be the next CEO."

One man, named Jim, was there that day and he, like the others,
received a seed. He went home and excitedly, told his wife the story.
She helped him get a pot, soil and compost and he planted the seed.
Everyday, he would water it and watch to see if it had grown. After
about three weeks, some of the other executives began to talk about
their seeds and the plants that were beginning to grow.

Jim kept checking his seed, but nothing ever grew.

Three weeks, four weeks, five weeks went by, still
nothing.

By now, others were talking about their plants, but Jim didn't have a
plant and he felt like a failure.

Six months went by -- still nothing in Jim's pot. He just knew he had
killed his seed. Everyone else had trees and tall plants, but he had
nothing. Jim didn't say anything to his colleagues, however, he just
kept watering and fertilizing the soil - He so wanted the seed to
grow.

A year finally went by and all the young executives of the company
brought their plants to the CEO for inspection.

Jim told his wife that he wasn't going to take an empty pot. But she
asked him to be honest about what happened. Jim felt sick to his
stomach, it was going to be the most embarrassing moment of his life,
but he knew his wife was right. He took his empty pot to the board
room. When Jim arrived, he was amazed at
the variety of plants grown by the other executives. They were
beautiful -- in all shapes and sizes. Jim put his empty pot on the
floor and many of his colleagues laughed, a few felt sorry for him!

When the CEO arrived, he surveyed the room and greeted his young executives.

Jim just tried to hide in the back. "My, what great plants, trees and
flowers you have grown," said the CEO. "Today one of you will be
appointed the next CEO!"

All of a sudden, the CEO spotted Jim at the back of the room with his
empty pot. He ordered the Financial Director to bring him to the
front. Jim was terrified. He thought, "The CEO knows I'm a failure!
Maybe he will have me fired!"

When Jim got to the front, the CEO asked him what had happened to his
seed - Jim told him the story.

The CEO asked everyone to sit down except Jim. He looked at Jim, and
then announced to the young executives, "Behold your next Chief
Executive Officer!

His name is Jim!" Jim couldn't believe it. Jim couldn't even grow his seed.

"How could he be the new CEO?" the others said.

Then the CEO said, "One year ago today, I gave everyone in this room a
seed. I told you to take the seed, plant it, water it, and bring it
back to me today. But I gave you all boiled seeds; they were dead - it
was not possible for them to grow.

All of you, except Jim, have brought me trees and plants and flowers.
When you found that the seed would not grow, you substituted another
seed for the one I gave you. Jim was the only one with the courage and
honesty to bring me a pot with my seed in it. Therefore, he is the one
who will be the new
Chief Executive Officer!"

* If you plant honesty, you will reap trust

* If you plant goodness, you will reap friends

* If you plant humility, you will reap greatness

* If you plant perseverance, you will reap contentment

* If you plant consideration, you will reap perspective

* If you plant hard work, you will reap success

* If you plant forgiveness, you will reap reconciliation

So, be careful what you plant now; it will determine what you will reap later.
Think about this for a minute....
If I happened to show up on your door step crying, would you care?

If I called you and asked you to pick me up because something
happened, would you come?

If I had one day left to live my life, would you be part of that last day?

If I needed a shoulder to cry on, would you give me yours?

This is a test to see who your real
friends are or if you are just someone to talk to you  when they are bored.

Do you know what the relationship is between your two eyes?

They blink together,
they move together,
they cry together,
they see things together,
and they sleep together,
but they never see each other;
....that's what friendship is..
Your aspiration is your motivation, your
motivation is your belief,
your belief is your peace,
your peace is your target,
your target is heaven, and life is like hard core torture without it!

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Habits

From Bob Goshen's book titled "The Power of Layered Leadership"

Page 111

" I am your constant companion. I am your greatest helper or I am your heaviest burden. I will push you onward or I will drag you down to failure. I am completely at your command. Half of the things you do, you might just as well hand them over to me and I will be able to do them much quicker. I am not easily managed. You must really be firm with me. Show me exactly how you want something done and after a few lessons I will do it automatically. I am the servant of all great men and women and, alas, of all failures as well. Those who are great--- I have made great. Those who are failures --- I have made failures. I am not a machine, although I work with all the precision of a machine plus the intelligence of a man. You can run me for profit or you can run me for ruin, it makes no difference to me. Take me, train me, be firm with me and I will place the world at your feet. Be easy with me and I will destroy you. Who am I ? I am habit."

---- Anonymous

Habits are what brought you to where you are today......... habits are what can take you to where you want to be in the future.

The Middle Class in America Is Radically Shrinking Here Are the Stats to Prove it

Thank you Jon Hopkins for passing on this article.

Posted Jul 15, 2010 02:25pm EDT
by Michael Snyder
in Recession
From The Business Insider

Editor's note: Michael Snyder is editor of theeconomiccollapseblog.com

The 22 statistics detailed here prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace.

So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes? Well, the globalism and "free trade" that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects. It turns out that they didn't tell us that the "global economy" would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough.

Here are the statistics to prove it:

· 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
· 61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
· 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
· 36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.
· A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
· 24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
· Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
· Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
· For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
· In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
· As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
· The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation's wealth.
· Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.
· In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.
· The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
· In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
· More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
· or the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
· This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
· Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.
· Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
· The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income.

Giant Sucking Sound

The reality is that no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world. After all, what corporation in their right mind is going to pay an American worker 10 times more (plus benefits) to do the same job? The world is fundamentally changing. Wealth and power are rapidly becoming concentrated at the top and the big global corporations are making massive amounts of money. Meanwhile, the American middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence as U.S. workers are slowly being merged into the new "global" labor pool.

What do most Americans have to offer in the marketplace other than their labor? Not much. The truth is that most Americans are absolutely dependent on someone else giving them a job. But today, U.S. workers are "less attractive" than ever. Compared to the rest of the world, American workers are extremely expensive, and the government keeps passing more rules and regulations seemingly on a monthly basis that makes it even more difficult to conduct business in the United States.

So corporations are moving operations out of the U.S. at breathtaking speed. Since the U.S. government does not penalize them for doing so, there really is no incentive for them to stay.

What has developed is a situation where the people at the top are doing quite well, while most Americans are finding it increasingly difficult to make it. There are now about six unemployed Americans for every new job opening in the United States, and the number of "chronically unemployed" is absolutely soaring. There simply are not nearly enough jobs for everyone.

Many of those who are able to get jobs are finding that they are making less money than they used to. In fact, an increasingly large percentage of Americans are working at low wage retail and service jobs.

But you can't raise a family on what you make flipping burgers at McDonald's or on what you bring in from greeting customers down at the local Wal-Mart.

The truth is that the middle class in America is dying -- and once it is gone it will be incredibly difficult to rebuild.

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