Being amazing requires time, energy, money, love, inspiration, motivation, and many more resources. There are two types of resources: hard resources and soft resources.

Hard resources are quantifiable–they include time and money. Everybody has 24 hours in a day and a buck is a buck. They might have different meanings to different people, but they are tangible and quantifiable.

How you look at each resource is important to becoming amazing. Your relationship with time, money, knowledge, and other resources can propel you into an amazing life. When many high school students graduate, they have the choice of exchanging their time for money or investing their money and time into getting an education, which in the long run, will lead to an amazing life. Everybody has the choice every day to either just get by, keep up with the cycle, or invest their time, money, and energy into having an amazing life.

There are three types of activities you can perform with your resources. You can spend, invest, or waste them.

You can waste time by watching TV or invest it in reading a self-help book (like my books). You can waste time going on Facebook and seeing your friends living their amazing lives or you can go for a walk and invest time reflecting on what you want. You are faced with these opportunities every single day – it just leads you on to spend your resources, waste them, or invest them in being amazing. Disclaimer: Even I waste time and energy and money. I don’t invest everything I have into being amazing, after all–part of being amazing is having a good time. The goal is to be able to invest or spend or even waste your resources the way you want. The goal also is to live the life nobody around you gets to live.

We all have choices in life.  We have the opportunity to create our own lives.  Amazing begins with taking a hard look at what kind of resources we have at our disposal and deciding how we can parlay that into an amazing life.  Many people assume that they have to wait for the perfect time when everything will fall into place and the stars will align with the moon.  Isn’t that cute?  One of the keys to having an amazing life is understanding how to make the proper investments for you to live your amazing life.

Money

Even though money can’t buy happiness, I believe that money is a tool for happiness.  Money is not the root of all evil, although it can be.  You can hire a hit-man to kill anyone that you would like, although I do not advocate it.  You can waste money on your vices or you can invest in your education, your health, professional growth, and other things that can propel you into amazing.  Also, it is important for you to understand money and how it affects your ability to be amazing. I have spent money flying to conferences all over the country in hopes that I get one tiny step closer to amazing.  It is very important to study how money works.

Time

Even though everybody has the same amount of time, twenty four hours a day, how do you spend, invest or waste your time?  I perform all three.  I invest time everyday thinking about concepts like this.  I spend time with people and talk about nothing in particular and I love watching TV.  I have spent literally my entire life thinking about how a guy with a speech impediment who needs help with almost everything in his life can achieve amazing and taking that and turning it into an amazing career.  That’s how I define my body of work.  It’s not like one day when I was young, my dad came into my room and said “Son, I know you can’t write or talk, hey, why don’t you become a writer and a motivational speaker?”  That conversation did not happen.

Knowledge

We live in a high-paced world where everything is changing all the time.  It’s not like the old days when you went to school for four years and that knowledge will carry you to a pretty successful career with hard work.  I received a degree in business with the emphasis in marketing in 2001.  At the time, Facebook, Twitter and other on-line media were not even conceived.  Every other day there’s something new and if you don’t keep up, your chances of being amazing go down.  As my friend and mentor Joe Calloway says “If you are successful, you know what used to work.”  Even restaurants have adopted social media campaigns and other technology such as on line ordering.  To keep on the track of amazing requires you to always be learning.

One way to acquire knowledge is the simple art of asking questions.  Find people who you think keep hitting amazing and ask them targeted questions.  I had the opportunity to work with premiere speakers and anytime I had questions I just asked.  Here is the key.  Nobody is going to do the work for you and you have to respect their resources.

Every investment won’t pay off.  Amazing is not about making a great investment every time.  It’s about making enough investments and learning from your mistakes.  As you approach amazing you have learned a balance that works for you.  I have learned that there comes a point when I worked so hard that I become compulsive and it hurts me.  I found that I am more creative when I am out living my message.  I invest my time really thinking about life and when I get into the office I just write.

A word about my disability.  Everything in my life takes more money, more time, more energy and more resources.  I have to hire assistants to get me ready in the morning, type for me, help me with emails and countless tasks.  When I want to fly to a conference I have to pay double airfare, double food, yet I invest in being amazing.  I’m not going to lie, it sucks.  In my mind there are always two choices: I could sit around wishing life was easier or I could strive for amazing.

There are very few people who really invest anything into being amazing.  They pay their bills, take care of the minimum and anything that is left over they either spend or waste.  They spend any extra money on going out or vacations that they can’t afford and never go to a conference to learn what it takes to become amazing.  They dream of being rich but never read a book on how to do so.  Their skill set never changes.  The biggest investment that you can make in yourself is to pick up a book that interests you or attend a conference.  Learn what it takes to become amazing.  When you are investing in your life, or in becoming amazing, it’s called sacrifice and a sacrifice is a payment for a dream.