Welcome to the "beattitude" series of videos. "beattitude" is all about growth - growth in your personal life (health, relationships, finances, emotional, spiritual), growth in your business and growth in blogging (just in case you happen to be a blogger, too).

What is growth? First and foremost, growth is what happens when what is preventing it is eliminated. Growth is the natural state of things. Expressed, growth leads to happiness, while suppressed, it leads to frustration and despair. Growth is your most versatile key to a better life for yourself, the people around you and the world at large. Growth means progress, and progress of course is the great tendency of human kind that has survived all other tendencies combined. When you grow - when you eliminate everything that is preventing it - you realize what you get as a result of growth is not nearly as important as who you become in the process.

Blogging and personal growth are not often mentioned in a same breath with selling. For one thing, blogging and personal growth are noble while selling is very often given a bad rap. The three best reasons behind selling’s poor reputation are:

• People love to buy, but they don’t appreciate being sold to.
• Selling can be outright dishonest, deceiving and manipulative – often is.
• Selling is difficult. Rather than attempt and risk failure, doing nothing (while criticizing those who do) is the preferred option for many. But refusing to attempt requires reason, if only in their own mind, hence "selling is bad."

Some go as far as to declare “honest selling” an oxymoron.

Customer meets engineer. “Hey, engineer, can I ask you a question?”
The engineer replies, “I’m not allowed to talk to customers. We believe that honesty impedes sales.”
“I think you just impeded,” the customer concludes.

For one like me, blogger and entrepreneur, selling is simply part and parcel of life. Anyone ever engaged in getting ready for an important date has sales experience.

I value honesty AND selling equally. The two complement each other just fine. When there is absence of honesty, it’s in people, not in the act of selling per se. Creating a new business – for-profit or non-profit – absolutely involves selling. To engage in the act of selling with the goal of maybe one day employing others, and most significantly, to provide a service that improves peoples’ lives, I regard as my most fitting challenge and opportunity. Building a business is my greatest growth and contribution, greater than any charity I can make.

You're a baby boomer with more time than money. You dream of being debt-free again, and financially robust. Throughout your life you followed trends - from jeans to long hair to disco to investing in the stock market - but  now you realize it's not about trends and fashions anymore, it's serious business. Your money is decreasing at the rate your predicted longevity is increasing. Every other day science is adding another five years to your predicted life span. You need to be making money again. Not just for a month or two, but for many years. But the landscape has changed. What you've learned is nearly worthless, and what you must learn seems like a mountain. You worry. You Can Do Better Than That!

Many of the things you now take for granted were once impossible. Luckily, your mind didn't conceive of impossible back then. Learning - your very survival depended on it - occurred naturally rather than memorably. It's what allowed you to upgrade yourself from the sippy cup to the cocktail glass.

Therein lies your answer to today's challenges. Simply return to your roots. Reclaim your right and freedom to learn the way you were meant to, by trial and error, or as I like to call it, by the awesome power of zigzagging.

Learn From Kids. It's Easy. You Once Were One Yourself.

The best minds for learning are the minds of children. When kids are beginners at anything they ask questions at the beginner level. They make mistakes - not deliberately, but naturally as part of the process. They don't mind not knowing, they only mind not learning. Always looking for people who already know what they are in the process of learning, they spend time around them and ask them questions. Kids instinctively know there's no need to (re-)invent the wheel each time a wheel is needed. If a child were to build a telescope, s/he would look for some with telescopes, hopefully someone who understands people love to learn much better than being taught. Kids, like grown-ups, can make much progress when mistakes are made, best in rapid succession. Kids just know, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until you learn to do it well. Why, they even learn to dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.

You don’t learn so that you can then do. That’s an anxiety reaction and an avoidance behavior. You can't get wet from the word "water." The doer alone learns. Birds are given wings by falling. You, too, learn by jumping, or you’ll never learn at all. Or worse, you’ll abandon your calling altogether. When you learn, if you "fail," you cannot learn less.