PILLAR 10

Conducting a Self-Inventory to Find Your Friends and Foes

When I was younger, I worked in a fast-food joint, flipping burgers and making shakes. It was a fun job. I got to get on the microphone and yell back orders as well as let my personality fly over the loudspeakers, and I had a great group of people around me. All in all, I enjoyed it. But four times a year, we all had to do something I absolutely despised: INVENTORY. I hated it. Every quarter, like clockwork, we would have to do a complete, extreme, itemized inventory.

Every ketchup packet, every bun, every straw, and every bottle of syrup had to be accounted for. We had to see what could be used and what needed to be thrown away. Even if we were throwing something away, my manager would want to know what it was and how much we were tossing. She understood that in order to maintain success, the business had to take account of all the things that were helping the restaurant and all the things that were hurting the bottom line.

Just like every successful business, you too have to do an inventory, but this one is an inventory of yourself. You need to do this so you can become successful and maintain that high level of success.

Slow down. Take your time with this. It won’t be simple, and it won’t be easy. It is one of the most important things you will do on this journey to becoming a first-generation millionaire. Consider it mandatory for success. I’ve done it myself, and sometimes you learn things about yourself that you don’t particularly like, which is extremely important to take account of. For me, it was realizing that I had to take a season of separation from my childhood friends when I first started to become very successful—not because of anything they were saying or doing but because of the way I was acting around them.

I was acting a certain way around my childhood friends that wasn’t who I wanted to be then or in the future. You see, when I began finding success onstage, earning money, and making a name for myself, I realized that I was keeping that part of my life hidden whenever I went back to the old neighborhood to see my childhood friends. (For the sake of clarity, I am going to call these friends “my boys” so you don’t confuse them with the formal definition of friends—people, places, or things that are pushing you toward your goal.) I morphed back into “fun Johnny” and channeled that Fresh Prince of Bel-Air attitude that everyone loved so much. But that wasn’t entirely who I was anymore. Now I was also “professional Johnny,” someone people looked up to and respected. Instead of letting them see more of the “professional Johnny,” I hid my success so I could be “fun Johnny” around them.

I started looking closely at my behavior. Why was I doing this? Was this a liability or an asset for me? As you perform a self-inventory, you must take account for every liability and every asset. An asset is something adding toward your success goals, and a liability is anything that takes away or moves you further from your goals. If it was a liability, I needed to know how and why, so that when I repeated this pattern down the road, I could recognize it quickly and act accordingly. I didn’t want my liability to kick my assets, which was sure to happen if I ignored the liabilities and let them take over.

Let me be clear: my boys weren’t my foes. I just needed to take a step back to figure out what was happening. I acted one way around the people who paid me to show them how to succeed and a completely different way around the people who have known me since I was a teenager. I felt a battle waging between the past and the present, and I didn’t know how to balance who I was and who I was becoming.

In order to find the answer to that question, I first needed to identify the foe. I decided anything that didn’t allow me to be the new me was a foe. If it wasn’t pushing me toward my destiny, it was a foe. And, in this particular situation, I was the foe. I had to identify that fact so I could take a season of separation from these situations to get back on track again. I knew this was important. The danger of not identifying the foe in yourself is probably more dangerous than not identifying an exterior foe.

I thought my problem was that I wanted to be the high school, early 1990s’ teenage Johnny with these guys, even though they were seeing my new lifestyle. I finally figured out that I wasn’t worried about being liked or not. I was worried about coming across as a Mr. Know-It-All. Everyone else had no problem talking about their own successes, but because mine were so entrenched in global seminars about making money and teaching success principles, I didn’t feel comfortable. But my actions and attitude were actually robbing them of their own potential. I could have helped them, but I didn’t. I took a step back, recognized why this was happening, and then discarded it from my life. For a time. I am still dealing with this issue today.

I still hang out with my boys—our relationships haven’t changed—but I don’t know how to be 100-percent comfortable when I talk about money and success when we are all together. I find that instead of talking openly about business when we are all hanging out, they pull me aside and have one-on-one conversations with me. They all know what I have been up to. But even though they see me with Steve Harvey, or in pictures with Oprah, or at the White House with Emmitt Smith, they treat me the same way they did when we were all hanging out in high school. And I love them for it. But it’s not fair to them that they need to go out of their way to ask for help. When I see this enemy within me once again, then once again, I have to take inventory of myself.

Even today, I continue to take inventory of this part of me. However, instead of a season of separation so I can figure it out, now I use the inventory I took way back when, recognize what is happening again, and change my behavior accordingly. Perhaps this means having a monthly breakfast where my boys can pick my brain or taking the time to step back and have everyone ask questions of each other based on our individual strengths. I still haven’t found the perfect answer yet, but because I have already taken inventory of this foe and personal liability, I recognize it immediately when it rears its head again.

Performing self-inventory is not something that you do once and then never think about again. It is something that you do all the time. When you understand the inventory that’s inside you, your assets and the liabilities that live within you and all around you, it empowers you to adjust and adapt in the now. My mentor Les Brown taught me, “Johnny you don’t know what you don’t know.” Not knowing your inventory of personal assets versus your inventory of personal liabilities puts you at a major personal disadvantage in any kind of fight.

Mentally compartmentalizing your personal liabilities and identifying your personal foes places you in position for far greater opportunities for perpetual victories. Remember, it is better to be prepared and never called than it is to be called and not prepared. Self-inventory is about future preparation for the unpredictable that life throws at us all. The ability to respond to life in the now is reserved for those who prepared in advance. Self-inventory and identifying your friends and your foes before the battle is mandatory for anyone who desires to master the mindset of a first-generation millionaire.

If you find this exercise easy, I promise you are doing it incorrectly. If you conduct your self-inventory in the truly right way, it should be challenging and very emotional. You must face and uncover every asset and every liability if you truly want legacy wealth. There are many people whom I have helped become massively successful who lost it all because self-inventory was not a priority above becoming wealthy.

Remember, the mindset of a first-generation millionaire is that you create the wealth. The wealth does not create you. A true in-depth dive into self-inventory allows you to build a strong foundation of great character. One of my golden rules for the mindset of a first-generation millionaire is that you never compromise your character for financial or public gain. Success and wealth attract temptations that most people would be devoured by, but those who master this exercise of self-inventory will have far more victories than they do losses because they know who they are from the inside out.

Remember, life happens to us all. What happens to us is never as important as what we allow to happen in us. This chapter is designed to fortify you for when life happens. Not if, but when.

ACTION STEP

Your ability to identify friends or foes quickly and efficiently could make you or cost you millions. Think carefully about everything and everyone you have interacted with since you started reading this book. Now, identify all the people, places, and things that are holding you back from your goal of being a first-generation millionaire.

What are some of the conversations you’ve had that made you rethink your goals? What are the places you went to that made you feel like you were not going to succeed? If people want to quit smoking, they can’t go around with a pack of cigarettes in their pocket. Just like a smoker who wants to quit, you have to flush all of those loose cigarettes, even the ones in your backup, emergency stash. You have to get rid of all the foes of your goals, no matter how hard it is.

Every conversation you have is either complementing your goal or hindering your success. I am hereby mandating that you sacrifice and eliminate anything in your life that is hold-ing you back while you are on this journey to becoming a first-generation millionaire. Before you turn the page, you must determine your friends and foes. You cannot move forward in the book until you do this.

PILLAR 10