Forgive us, regular readers for our absence from Aridni last week. We weren’t reaching our million dollar goals, let alone sharing our journey and ideas with you. We’re back now—in full swing!—with some great lessons.

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Making millions is more than enriching our own lives. Focus on adding as much value to the world and other people as you can. Sometimes, we forget about others because we’re so focused on obtaining our own goals. (Did you remember Mother’s Day amongst $$ making strategies?) In order to strengthen ourselves, our money strategies have to increase the standard of living on earth.

You might be doing this already.

Before I felt determined to gain wealth, I spent a lot of time volunteering. Now I volunteer a few hours a month—maybe. Last week, a woman caught me off guard when I was fixing up a property. She was raising money for Relay for Life, an American Cancer Society fundraiser I used to heavily volunteer for. I had no money to give her and no time to spare. My husband, with the only available wallet, was gone. The paintbrush in my hand was drying out.

Since that day, I have been reading The One Minute Millionaire. I’m not done reading, though I’d already recommend it. In this book, current millionaires teach the aspiring how to build wealth and give 10 percent of every gain to charity. To grow a little, Aridni readers, we should give a little.

Make your path to wealth positive for other people, too. (And send your mom a really fantastic Mother’s Day gift if you got distracted with $$ in your eyes instead of her love.)

Can you create solutions when there are seemingly impossible problems? Great managers need to find solutions when other people aren’t necessarily even aware of the problem or room for the improvements.

Take for example the problem that once faced owners of payphones. Generally in the US, you put in a couple of quarters and can chat for as long as you want. Some people would take serious advantage of this and talk for long periods of time minimizing the company’s profits. In other countries there is a time limit associated with an amount of change. So how can a company increase the profits without losing a competitive edge?
(I’ll tell you how they solved this problem at the end of the article, see if you can figure out a solution.)

(Continue reading this article…)

When you have a task for your boss, do you rush right out and do it? Or how about your employees, do they rush out and complete a task right when you assign it to them?

Perhaps the first couple of times you will run out and work diligently to complete your task. The people under you will hustle and strive for perfection. But if conditions seem unaffected, then it can get old fast.

What I’m getting at here is a rewards system. If people don’t enjoy or benefit from working on a project it makes little to no sense for them to continue at full steam.

It is hard to link somebody’s effort directly to their reward as the outcome may not be the desired one for the company’s owner or shareholders.

Ben Franklin came up with a linking system to make it a little easier.

Ben proposed linking the effort to the performance. From there he linked performance to reward. Using this it not only keeps your employees working hard, but it also allows them to be rewarded.

This concept is from the book, “Ben Franklin’s 12 Rules of Management.” Check it out.

I’m on to the second half of the book now; of course that book is “Ben Franklin’s 12 Rules of Management.” Today I will review how Franklin would suggest approaching any moral dilemma.

Franklin prompted people to create their own unique set of values that all their actions could be guided by. He came up with “The Art of Virtue” a publication he wrote following five steps to create your values and follow them.

Step 1: Identify and clarify your values – What is important to how you live and how you want to live?
Step 2: Turn your values into behavioral goals - What can you do to turn your values into measurable goals?
Step 3: Set up a monitoring and feedback system – What type of system can you set up to track your progress toward your goals?
Step 4: Be prepared for failure – Not every grand vision is realistic, but it’s existence is enough to improve a project.
Step 5: Be prepared for criticism – To directly quote the book here “It’s anybody who even attempts the process of character perfection who will be ridiculed.”

Check back on Saturday to learn about Ben Franklin’s virtues and the man who challenged them. (Or better yet, subscribe to our RSS feed and get it automatically!)

In our quest toward greatness, it’s easy to forget the little things. I picked up Suze Orman’s book entitled, “The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous, and Broke.” The book claims to be the answer to our generation’s cry for financial help.

Think you don’t need the help a woman like this offers? Neither did I. But did you wash behind your ears without your mom’s reminders? Suze provides some great tips I wouldn’t have guessed on my own.

While you and I might not be classified in her terms like “Generation Debt” and “Generation Broke”, I’d suggest picking up her book. We know not to buy a luxury car that’ll depreciate faster than we can pay it off, and we know that our credit score means the world in some scenarios. But don’t skip this book (even if you cannot stand Suze’s lack of television appeal) because you might not know points like these:

• Never invest money in a mutual fund ending with the letter “A” or “B”
• Don’t get a variable annuity, which makes a lot of money for your financial advisor but not much money for you
• Don’t rely on a will; she’s thinking of trusts

I’m now halfway though the book “Ben Franklin’s 12 Rules of Management.” In this series I am bringing forth some of the thoughts and techniques that are written in each chapter.

Today’s chapter follows the basic idea that everybody wants to appear reasonable. We want other people to think that we’re ‘guided by reason rather than custom and superstition.’

The first bit of advice we are given is to stop using the phrase, “I feel like we should…” and instead start things with, “I think that based on … we should …” The basic idea here is simple, even though you will make the same argument, in the second way it is more based on reason to those around you.

The chapter gives an instance where Ben Franklin uses this method of convincing people to stop drinking during the day. He worked in a printing press in London for a while where some of the men would drink 6 pints of Ale in a day. And 5 of those were before they were even done with the work day! They had assumed that it kept them productive and fed. Ben came along drinking water, eating bread, being more productive, and saving money, that convinced some of the men to switch over to his ways. Others simply took out a weekly loan with interest from Ben to pay for their beer.

The next topic is based on the idea that people around us will affect our own behavior. That is one reason that Ben didn’t want to associate with heavy drinkers, he knew he would be more likely to drink as a result. Franklin spent a considerable amount of time working to surround himself with self-educating, hard working, frugal, and purpose driven people.

The ending of this chapter gives a warning about being reasonable too far in advance. There are always conditions such as weather that we can’t anticipate accurately in the long run. So you must remember that reason has its limits.

Next Thursday, I’ll have the next chapter for you, “Becoming a Person of Value”