Steve the Owl's Blog

Hi, everyone. It has been a busy time for me as of late, what with visiting my family in West Virginia, preaching a sermon nine days ago, tracking down paperwork to make sure that credentials are in order, and starting another semester at Temple University. However, one thing that I have been thinking about for several days now, after Martin Luther King Day, is about the nature of what it means in order to have lived a multi-faceted life with a challenging and complex message, only to be remembered as a two-dimensional character.

The Impetus for the Post

Eight years ago, while I was stationed in northern Iraq, I saw a drawing for some material commemorating Martin Luther King, and the winners would be announced on Martin Luther King Day. I went to the mess hall the next day, and I saw my name on the list of winners. To my surprise, I found out that there were more free books than there were people who entered the raffle, so I was allowed to get whatever book I wanted. When I picked my book, I saw one that compelled me more than the others: A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

In this book, there are several of Martin Luther King’s sermons, from the 1950′s into 1968, the year he was assassinated. A lot of people think of Martin Luther King as someone who gave a great speech on the Washington Mall with the refrain, “I have a dream…” Anyone who has ever written music or any oral form of communication knows the importance of repeating a key word or phrase in order to help the audience remember it, and anyone who has studied at a seminary can recognize the preacher’s rhythm of the words and tone of the I Have a Dream speech, and can probably sit down and diagram each of the major points of a well-crafted sermon. Here is the speech in its entirety:

Many of us in the United States hear of that speech, and we also hear of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the 1955 event spurred on by Rosa Parks’ refusal to get up from her seat on a bus, that eventually prompted an effort by black people in Montgomery to refuse to ride any bus that would not treat them equally, which eventually broke the back of the bus system in Montgomery, and after a year, it ended in victory.

However, this sanitized version of Martin Luther King is not the whole truth. Civil rights was and is an important part of King’s legacy, but it is not the only part of his message. He was a brilliant man who was taken from us far too soon, dying at the end of a gun at the age of 39. However, he began his national role at the age of 26 years old. He went across the country preaching a message of justice, and making sure that the message of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution applied to all, and not just a few.

A Broad Message

As I read the book, I found that this book covered one area more than any other: poverty. Over and over, he pointed out the unjust nature of an economic system that too often focused on greed and focused on the haves rather than everyone. In his lifetime, King advocated a national guaranteed income and he opposed the Vietnam War, both because he opposed violence, and because of what he saw happening to poor people in the region whose farmland was destroyed. As a matter of fact, when he died in 1968 in Memphis, he was not there for a civil rights march, he was there to stand in support of striking sanitation workers, as part of his Poor People’s Campaign. If you have never heard Martin Luther King on poverty, here is a powerful video juxtaposed with images of what poverty really means:

Martin Luther King was a great man with a great message, but I believe that we do him a disservice by ignoring the whole message of Martin Luther King.

How do you fight to make sure that someone’s entire legacy is remembered and not turned into a cartoon?

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Hi, everyone. Welcome back to my blog. Today, I’ve been thinking about a book that I’ve recently read by Muhammad Yunus, the man known as “the banker to the poor” who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his work founding Grameen Bank, a bank in Bangladesh that devotes its work to microlending that involves loans that average the equivalent to just a few US dollars (when he first started, the average loan was the equivalent to $27 US) that, along with the other social businesses Grameen has started, has lifted millions out of poverty and greatly improved circumstances in his native land. In this book, Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism, Yunus describes a vision for a different type of capitalism that has great potential to help billions across the world.

Conscience Plays a Role

Muhammad Yunus started out his professional life as an economics professor at Middle Tennessee State University. However, in the 1970′s, while explaining economic theory to his students, he saw the devastating effects of civil war and natural disaster on his native land, and he knew that he must do something to break the vicious cycle of poverty. With this in mind, he returned to Bangladesh. He listened to people to find out what they needed to break the cycle of poverty, and he talked to the banks, but they told him the same thing over and over again: these are people who are unreliable risks for loans, and the loans are of so little value that money that they can’t produce a profit.

Understanding Leading to Change

For Yunus, this answer would not do. While some unscrupulous business make money off the poor who have no access to the banking system by charging ridiculously high interest rates, Yunus started by giving people money out of his own pocket. He had no desire to become a banker, because he saw himself as an economist, and he kept trying to get people who were bankers to see the potential. Even after years of a nearly 100% repayment rate which most banks could only dream of, the bigger banks insisted that people would never repay and it was impossible to make a profit lending to the poor.

The Value of Vision

In addition to understanding the need for people in Bangladesh, and the courage to act in good conscience, Yunus started to see a business model that could help more than just those who receive loans from Grameen Bank. His bank was not a non-profit enterprise. He exempted the poorest of the poor from interest, but he does charge interest for most loans, with no loan having a higher interest rate than 20%. Eventually, he felt that it was necessary to not just lift people out of poverty through their smaller business, but that this money should be reinvested and leading to something bigger. This included women who purchased cell phones and went from village to village allowing people to have access to cell phones. As time went on, more and more Bangladeshis got phones of their owns, as well as Internet access.

Yunus did this and played such a huge role in improving the conditions in his country because he refused to accept the safe answer, and he developed a new idea for “social business,” which involves companies that seek to make a profit, but use the profit for the betterment of society rather than to pad the portfolio of investors, that competes alongside traditional companies. He also saw poor people as people with dignity, and he set up investment programs for people who made little money to encourage saving.

In the United States, a country with poverty that, admittedly, sees poverty in a different light than Bangladesh, the poor are also marginalized. For example, most banks require at least $100 in order to open an account, which means that people who don’t have that kind of money have to go to check-cashing and bill-pay centers that charge high rates to provide these services, or to loan services that charge rates that would make the worst loan sharks blush. (Most banks also have minimum loan amounts of $5000. I’ve known banks in West Virginia that have smaller loans, but they are the exception rather than the rule.) I don’t know to what extent the rest of these things happen in the rest of the industrialized world, but I wonder how much different things would be if people work to try to fight poverty instead of make money off of it in a way that continues the cycle.

What ways do you think that we can think about capitalism in a way that helps as many people as possible?

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Take an Inventory of Yourself and Find Out How Many of the “Ghosts” Are Standing in Your Way- Napoleon Hill

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the final installment in my weekly series on Napoleon Hill’s classic book, Think and Grow Rich. It has been my honor to present the overview of the book and weekly summaries to help you on your path of personal development. We have talked about each of the thirteen steps to riches that Hill presented, each of them in a logical pattern that begins internally and then works its way to the outside and action steps. Today, I will mention the six ghosts, and focus on the one that is the most important one to exorcise in the path to success.

The Six Ghosts

Napoleon Hill argues that there are a total of six mindsets, or ghosts, that stand in the way of one’s success, and he insists that the first three are the primary drivers of all of the other ghosts. The first three are the fear of poverty, criticism, and ill health. And the more secondary ghosts are the fear of loss of love of someone, old age, and death. We can see so many of these in effect in our lives. Three of the four are the basis of a multi-billion-dollar industry. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t try to take care of ourselves, but I have to wonder what the line is between healthy concern and dangerous obsession. The fear of criticism can be seen in those who worry so much about pleasing others that they don’t try to do their all because of the remarks that will come their way if they fail.

The Fear of Poverty

However, the one that is most insidious of them all is the fear of poverty. When Napoleon Hill wrote Think and Grow Rich, the country was recovering from the Great Depression, but unemployment was still 12%, and then an austerity program that the country just wasn’t ready for (read into this what you will) lead to another deep recession that pulled unemployment back up to 19%. While this was the New Deal era, we were only at the beginning of the establishment of the social safety net (for example: food stamps were not established until 1965), and it wasn’t nearly as big as it is today. While credit cards have problems of their own, there really wasn’t much of a way at the time for people to be able to afford basic necessities of life if they ran out of money.

Fast-forward to today. While we are not in the situation we were 75 years ago, we have unemployment that has remained stubbornly high, and the groups that usually step in to get the engines of the economy moving when stalled have said that they are tapped out. With people out of work for so long that their unemployment runs out, and their saving run out as well, and it is very easy to think that “playing it safe” is the only real option. Unfortunately, the only way to completely break the cycle of poverty is to do what seems counterintuitive and take risks.

If one defines wealth as a way that one has enough assets that produce enough residual income to actually exceed all expenses even if something does happen to a source of income (For example, if someone spends $2500 a month for his/her family’s lifestyle, and assets produce this kind of yield.) it is necessary to invest and find the vehicles that produce this kind of money. The other thing that the fear of poverty does is make one look for something that is simply a “safe job” over a fulfilling job that leads to one’s goals.

Of course, there are times when these jobs that are seen as satisfying happen, and if this happens, your goal for wealth-building might not be that of a lot of people in the world of network marketing who try to make enough to replace their business, but to do as Jim Rohn said, “Work full-time for your income and part-time on your fortune.” This is advice that was confirmed when I read an article the other day about millionaires next door, and one of those great tips was that if there is a two-income family, to live off one and invest the other.

Everything that I have ever read about the world of building wealth has pointed out that it is vital to devote a portion of income to building wealth through investments. (David Bach says the more the better, but that 10% should be the minimum. He also advises building a safety net and saving for long-term expenses and for fun purchases. T. Harv Eker recommends living off of only half of after-tax income, with several different investment, fun, and security vehicles.) Investing that percentage when all of the chips seem to be down takes a courage that cannot coexist with a crippling fear of poverty. There have been times when I have struggled immensely, and it has made any effort to step forward that much more difficult.

I hope you have enjoyed this series as much as I have enjoyed writing it. Here’s to conquering that fear and building for your future!

How do you fight your ghosts of fear?

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