American Prudential Capital, Inc.

You are probably not an elitist.  But you may have innocently been supporting a profit-making elitist concept without even knowing it.

The pitch goes something like this:  ”pay me $20,000  to $200,000 and I will let you join my club where you will meet only the most important movers and shakers around.”

When invited to attend one such event I was told over and over how very important the other people in the room were.  There was only one problem…I had never heard of any of those folks.

Come to find out they probably had been told that I would be at the meeting and that I was “really important.”   Needless to say someone was selling elitism but I was not buying.

The identifying mark of truly great leaders and statesmen over the years is that they meet people on level ground.  I think Senator Kerry lost his bid for the Presidential nomination because he was perceived as an elitist.

John McCain, who went to school with Kerry and moves in the same circles, did not get labeled an elitist.  Neither of them won the office.  Possibly they are both elitists.  I don’t know.

What I do know is that I make conscious decisions to avoid elitist circles.  My clients are not elitists, my prospects are not elitists, my friends are not elitists.  So, I see no practical advantage in being elitist.

But every so often someone tries to convince me that I should move in elite circles.  Why?

I believe that elitism as a business model may work if you are selling 30 million dollar houses in River Oaks.  For the rest of us, the Internet, email, Facebook, Linked-In, Twitter and all the rest have taken us into the business model of egalitarianism.

So, put on your best marketing face but make it your real face.   Tell people the truth and treat folks with respect.  Don’t “think more highly of yourself than you ought.”

Meet prospects on level ground and avoid groups that leverage off your “importance” to sell memberships or anything else.  Sure you will have to meet some folks who cannot use your goods or services.

But, you will never know who they know who knows someone who does need what you have to offer.  And that referral will be more than a warm lead, it will be a real deal.

Brenda Standlee

If you grow up poor it is easy to have  a defeated/helpless attitude.  That is, it is easy unless your parents do not have a “poverty mentality.”

I once knew a family, and you probably know one too, who came here from Vietnam with nothing.  The parents worked constantly mostly at the local gas station/food mart.  The children all did well in school and the parents helped them go to college.  They graduated and went on to become Pharmacists and Doctors.  How did this family succeed in getting out of poverty where so many others fail?

I think they succeeded because of their investments.  The parents wisely understood that they would not be leaving any great legacy of stock earnings to their children.  What they would leave them with was an education with which their children could pull, not only themselves but their parents as well, out of what could have been hope-crushing poverty.

The parents invested in their children.  They stayed the course through all the really tough years of raising children.  It was not easier for them than other families but harder; they worked all the time.  Older children had to supervise younger children.  Homework had to be checked and curfews enforced.

They were frugal, yes and they lived on what they earned.  They did not own a house which they could not afford. They did not own a house at all.   Yet, they ended their poverty in one generation!

You see these parents had internalized the concept of  ”servant leadership.”

You have probably heard the story about the man who visits Heaven and hell.  In hell people are sitting around a pot of stew with spoons 5 feet long strapped to their arms.  They are starving because they cannot get the spoons back from the pot to their mouths; the spoons are too long.

In Heaven folks sit around a similar pot of stew with the same 5 foot long spoons strapped to their arms.  But in Heaven everyone is fat and happy because they use the spoons to feed each other.

If one poor Vietnamese immigrant family can end their poverty in one generation, why can’t one town, one city, one state, one nation?

Brenda Standlee