The Profit Prophet

Some time ago I came upon a list of 18 Things Mentally Strong People Do with a wonderful graphic. While it was a great list, it did not give any advice on how to achieve these 18 Things. What I would like to do here is expound upon this list with some insight. While having a list is always good, reasons behind the list are usually better in getting a person to act and grow. As Amelia Earhart’s quote goes, “The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity.” So, let’s all decide to act towards being a stronger, better person! 1. They move on I would put it more like they do not dwell on things that they cannot control. They fully understand their limits and realize when the return on effort nets zero (or something less than zero). As Helen Keller put it, “When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.” Those people who are mentally tough see those ne...

Most business school programs focus on the financial aspects of an business endeavor, and most specifically tend to focus on one simple parameter: Return-on-Investment, or ROI. Specifically, ROI is determined by calculating the profit (or gain) from any investment or expenditure, subtracting the cost of that investment or expenditure, and dividing the difference by the cost of that investment or expenditure. While this is a great metric for determining actual expenditures’ returns, it does not really bode well when dealing with intangibles such as services, or activities such as sales, marketing, accounting, etc. A long time ago (30 years ago) I started measuring to a different metric, Return-on-Effort, which took into account how much time, energy, additional assets (such as people), and change any new project will cost and weighed those "costs" against how much easier, faster, or more efficiently you could perform the process by expending that additional effort, to...