Thoughts on Leadership: Grow For It!

This week my travels found me in Chicago for the 2015 National Convention of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals®. NAHREP® is The Voice for Hispanic Real Estate® and an incredibly important organization that works tirelessly to help Hispanic families achieve the American Dream of homeownership. (I wrote about this association in a previous post you can read here.) It was an honor to meet with NAHREP® members and leaders, like Teresa Palacios Smith, agent with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Georgia Properties, who serves as NAHREP® president.

After Chicago, I departed for Minneapolis to attend a board meeting and from there made my way to Iowa to speak with the amazing Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices First Realty team in Des Moines.

And in between meetings and conferences,  I made time to listen to—or better, re-listen to—The Richest Man in Babylon by George Samuel Clason on audiobook. You might already know I’m an avid fan of business-related books, and I rank this one high on the list of top financial literature. The book is written as a series of parables set in ancient Babylon—published in 1926—but even though it was released almost a century ago and describes a time long before this, the relevancy of its core principles rings truer than ever, even to this day. Here are some of my favorite quotes:

• “A part of all you earn is yours to keep.”

• “Always do the affairs of [man and woman]* change and improve because keen-minded [men and women] seek greater skill that they may better serve those upon whose patronage they depend. Therefore, I urge all [men and women] to be in the front rank of progress and not to stand still, lest they be left behind.”

• “In tilling the soil, in honest trading, in all of [man and woman]’s occupations, there is opportunity to make a profit upon [his or her] efforts and [his or her] transactions. Perhaps not all the time will [he or she] be rewarded because sometimes [his or her] judgment may be faulty and other times the winds and the weather may defeat [his or her] efforts. Yet, if [he or she] persists, [he or she] may usually expect to realize [his or her] profit. This is so because the chances of profit are always in [his or her] favor.”

*All quotes were originally expressed by Clason with masculine references.

So, what’s the message? Financial achievements in business don’t come along by chance. They come about with perseverance, persistence and a willingness to learn—through experiences like the NAHREP® National Convention or by listening to the thoughts of smart thinkers like Clason—because it’s only when you allow yourself to grow do you give yourself any chance to succeed.

Grow for it!

Gino

GINO BLEFARI is CEO of HSF Affiliates LLC. You can follow Gino on Facebook and Twitter.