What Tim Bradley can teach us about Undeserved victories in Business and Life

The sports world is up in arms about this past Saturday nights championship fight between Bradley and Pacquiao. Many are screaming that the fight was fixed and that Bradley clearly did not win that fight. Even Bradley looked as if he didn’t feel he won the fight. But there are a few important lessons to be learned by Bradley’s unexpected and possibly undeserved win over Pacquiao that the public and especially business people should not miss.

Lesson One – Sometimes you lose when you think you should win and sometimes you win when you think you should have lost. Life is not fair.

Tim Bradley controlled the one thing that he could control about the outcome of the fight. He trained hard, came to the fight prepared and gave everything he had. People are screaming that the fight was fixed but anyone who watched that fight saw Bradley fight with his whole heart and do his very best. If the judges fixed the fight they clearly didn’t tell Bradley before hand.

In business everyone has major and minor setbacks but what most successful people won’t tell you is that a great deal of massive success is also about dumb luck. Ask Warren Buffet, Bob Johnson, or Mark Zuckerburg how much luck, timing, and undeserved good fortune helped them become champions in business. Like Tim Bradley they worked hard to prepare but they also showed up to the fight and won. Many with even more talent failed or never achieved success on such a massive scale.

Lesson Two – It’s going to be painful win or lose

People are so mad at the outcome that they totally missed that undefeated Tim Bradley fought almost the entire fight with a fractured foot. Could you go 12 rounds with a broken foot against one of the greatest boxers in the world? Business like boxing is a world where you sure to get your butt kicked each time you make a mistake and drop your guard or make a bad decision. Sometimes you keep making the same bad decisions and you keep getting punched in the face like Bradley did each time he didn’t block the left jab.

In the end no judge could have given Bradley the fight if he hadn’t stayed on his feet and made it all 12 rounds fighting his heart out. You can’t win the game if you aren’t there at the end and if you watch that fight Bradley went through a lot of pain to be there at the end. 

Successful business people all have a story about fighting against great odds. financial misfortunes, bad markets, lawsuits, and outright disaster but most who stay focused, come out the other side and win big. Unfortunately the majority quit too early and only have stories about the pain but not the reward. Bradley could have quit and I’m sure he wanted to.

Lesson Three – When you get an undeserved win be humble about it and gracious to the loser because chances come around

I gained total respect for Tim Bradley because of how he handled things after the decision was given. He complimented Pacquiao on a great fight and acknowledged that the crowd didn’t agree with the decision but he would keep his word and give Manny a rematch in November as promised. He showed so much class in that moment and didn’t fake it like he had really beaten the Pac Man. He got lucky because he was prepared well and finished the fight strong. He didn’t get a big head about winning because he knew he needed to do better and that he wasn’t the best fighter that day.

In business we all have some victories that are right place right time victories and we see others who are more talented fail. It is important to be humble and acknowledge our good fortune especially to ourselves. Being grateful and humble is a hard lesson to learn in America because we have a bragging culture but we also have a country full of people who were lucky to be born with opportunities they did nothing to earn. Bradley showed how to win with class.

A good friend of mine told me Bradley was clearly out classed in the fight and didn’t think Bradley ever has a chance of beating Pacquiao. I totally disagree. Go look at the Ali vs. Frasier where Frasier beat Ali like he stole something but Ali came back and took Frasier out in the next fight. Look at Ali vs Foreman”Rumble in the Jungle”, Ali was losing the entire fight and almost died in the ring but walked out a champion. Look at Moorer vs. Foreman, where a 50 year old George Foreman became Heavy Weight Champ of the World on one punch at the end of the fight.

In Boxing and in Business you always have a punchers chance even for an undeserved victory,

 

Wishing you Wealth Wellness and Wisdom

Manager of Wealth

 

Is Occupy Wall Street the Beginning of 21st Century Civil Rights?

People have taken to the streets because something is really wrong in America and they want change. What type of change they want and from whom is unclear at this moment, but Action is always a good start.

Is Occupy Wall Street the beginning of a 21st century civil rights movement? My answer is Possibly with a smile. I smile because although we have revised history to make ourselves the most moral people on the planet earth, the truth remains that we are far from completing the goals of the 20th century’s Civil Rights Movement. The truth is America ALWAYS takes a very long time to do the right thing. And lots of people get hurt in the meantime.

We are the country that wiped out most of the native people who were here before us, kept slavery in effect for 4 centurys, called the country free in 1776 but didn’t allow women to vote until 1920. Of course we didn’t have a Voting Rights Act until 1965. It took until 2011 for Gay Rights in the military. And yes we used to have children working in coal mines because our child labor laws were terrible for the first few hundred years. I could mention so many things that are basic human rights in the country that took way too long to come to pass but you get the point. We can see injustice and keep going along with it better than anyone on the planet but once we decide to do the right thing we want the world to adopt that view and we condemn anyone who is not so enlightened as America.

Occupy Wall Street can build itself into one of the great movements.  At its center is the idea that people should have a fair chance in life and not have to worry that the banks and other financial institutions are stealing their futures. It is a great idea that is taking shape but it will take time and those in power will not go quietly.

More importantly those that lead and support Occupy Wall Street should know that they will not be supported in word nor deed by the majority of people who will be helped by their efforts. 

The leaders of Occupy Wall Street should be prepared for lots of criticism from the very people they seek to help. Just as Martin Luther King and the civil rights workers did. Just as the women from the womens rights struggle did. Just as the first abolitionist did. They may live and die with high disapproval ratings like King only to one day be remade into champions of all Americans.

Power concedes nothing.  This system was not undone by credit default swaps and bad banking. It was doomed with passage of the Retirement Act of 1978 that created the IRA, 401K, thrift savings plan, and 403B. At that moment all of America’s workers became stock market gamblers with no real experience. That moment brought us here because America’s life savings flooded the market and created faux wealth of every type. That is what we must undo.

Slay that dragon and maybe we have a chance to survive. If we keep that system alive and keep training advisors the way we do now with the greatest compensation going to the plans with the highest risk we can not recover.

Will a 21st century civil rights save the people? I have no idea but we should do right because right is the right thing to do.

Will we recover? Yes we will recover, but perhaps not in your life time because in America we take a long long long time to do the right thing.

Wealth Wellness and Wisdom

Mark Fuller

Manager of Wealth

No time to sit back and watch the Wall Street Train Wreck!

I’m going to make this super short so that you can hear me through the noise.  A confused mind often opts to do absolutely nothing and so what you can count on is that most people in America will do nothing as their money evaporates in their retirement plan. Occupy Wall Street will not change that. When people get scared they usually do nothing but stand in one place and wait for the train wreck to happen.

Data from the social security administration says that only 3 out of every 100 working people retire securely with enough income to not be totally dependent on the government for the rest of their lives. That means we have a 97% chance of failure and it’s largely due to not knowing enough and making the right choices. 97% of people are good, decent, hard-working people. But they can’t retire well because every few years they lose most of their savings in the stock market. This will be the legacy of the tax deffered retirement plan. Write that down because in the future it will sound profound. It’s not profound but you can’t hear the truth of this through all the noise.

Our advisors were trained to believe in a plan that has a 97% chance of not working out. This doesn’t make your advisor a bad person.

This doesn’t make you a bad person. 

You will be like most of the 97% who thought they would make it without being properly educated and taking the right steps to secure themselves.

Truthfully, you can’t earn enough money to buy your way out of knowing what you need to know. Being rich now doesn’t make you wealthy in the future. In fact, if it did there wouldn’t be a 97% failure rate. If being rich now secured your future then the success rate would be over 25% for American Seniors. But its only 3%.

What ever you do don’t just stand there and do nothing! Think and act. A huge train is coming down the track.

60 Minutes told people two years ago but most are still just watching. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8C1ZUrYhC0

Wealth Wellness Wisdom

Mark