I met Masato Izumi after a two hour “Money Cultivation” seminar at the Financial Academy.  The woman I sat next to at the seminar explained to me that he owned fifteen buildings in Tokyo and was a multimillionaire.  As she explained this, I noticed how relaxed he was.  (Is he relaxed because he is rich or is he rich because he’s relaxed?)  He seemed like a nice guy and like I mentioned in my previous post, he encouraged me to read his book as a way of learning Japanese.

I’ve ditched the other Japanese book I read and am having a good time so far with this one.  It’s slow going.  This time I’m using my Japanese apps to look up vocabulary along the way.  (Until it’s not fun any more.)

What I like is his story.  (or what I understand of it.)  Izumi describes himself as a bad student during his high school days.   Against his family’s desire that he study to enter a good university,  Izumi-san decided that he wanted to be a hair stylist.  In Japan, apparently becoming a hair stylist is a long process.   After graduating from beauty school, prospective hairstylists start by a long period of sweeping up around the shop, then moving on to shampooing hair, etc.

Izumi-san barely scraped by on his salary of $1,300 a month.  In Tokyo, that amount doesn’t go far and he describes how economized by keeping the bathroom door open instead of buying another light bulb and spending more on electricity.

However, his life was changed by meeting the owner of the shop, a fashionable and friendly man who schooled Izumi san on the importance of learning about money, the economy, and investing in your self.

Like I’ve said before, it’s slow but fun going so let’s take a quick peek at the selected items of the table of contents to see where this puppy is going:

• Hoshisan (his hairdressing mentor) talks about the importance of developing curiousity
• If you don’t change your self, you can’t change anything
• Find your path!
• Begin with what you can do
• The two steps to sales
• Think of the reasons you CAN do it
• Think, “I want to change the areas where I lack knowledge of money”
• Listen to the stories of successful people
• the difference between “Return” and “Risk” oriented people
• How to save for investments
• First, invest in your self
• Thinking in terms of Return On Investment (ROI)
• Let’s learn from your job (or make learning your job)?
• Look for reasons you can do it!
• How to be prepared to take advantage of chances
• Leverage your wisdom, time, and money
• Know the risks
• Control your feelings and your money

Am I any richer in the week since I received this book?   Well, I have probably logged in eight or nine hours “studying” the book and learning Japanese without being bored out of my friggin’ Samurai mind.  Just trying to leverage my knowledge, time and money.  Pretty good Return on Investment for a $20 course.  Know what I mean, Vern?

It’s ironic that in order to get to the Japanese Financial Academy for a “Money Cultivation Course” I had to walk through the Diamond District on West 47th.   I’m not a gold and jewelry guy but I was pretty amazed at all the value and the level of security.  (Half of the stocky guys in front of the stores must have been off duty policemen.)

I was rather nervous but was greeted warmly at the registration desk.   The speaker for the day also spoke to me and asked me if I was okay with fast-talking Japanese.  I asked him to bring it on because part of my reason for being there was to learn Japanese through immersion.

Killing Two Birds With One Stone (Ouch)

As the talk began, I was doubly rewarded.   I got some pointers on money and more importantly,  was flooded with spoken and written language as the presentation proceeded.  一石二鳥　(literally, one stone, two birds).  Some of the pointers I was able to figure out were:

• Change your posture when you think about being and becoming rich.
• To cultivate money, you must first invest in yourself.
• Have big goals or you will just keep making them smaller.
• “The bigger the why the easier the how.”  Be clear with yourself about wealth creation.
• From now on, never say to yourself, “I am bad at math.”   Rather, think of it as a game with which to live and play.
• Think of yourself as the manager of your money.
• Keep a notebook of all your expenditures and investments.
• Keep a balance sheet of assets and liabilities and think of it as a scoreboard.
• Keep practicing your financial skills until it becomes natural like driving a car.

I’ve put a lot of focus on living debt free and having a more clear financial picture of my life, but lately I’ve felt the urge to focus on wealth creation.   The second half of the two hour lecture focused on foreign exchange, stocks, and real estate and was harder to understand.   Of course, there were plenty of materials and invitations to continue at the Financial Academy to learn more.   But I got a chance to hear a lecture about something I’m interested in–all in Japanese.  Two-fer.  Winning.  🙂

Freebies:  Pizza, Beer, and “An Important Life-Changing Talk About Money”

After the two hour-talk, the host invited us to enjoy pizza, soft drinks, and beer.   Additionally, the friendly staff of the Financial Academy distributed complimentary copies of the book,  人生が変わるお金の大事の話、An Important Life-Changing Talk About Money.   

As I enjoyed a diet cola, someone introduced me to Masato Izumi, the author of the book.  She explained that he owned 15 buildings and was a millionaire.   Izumi-san seemed very unassuming and more importantly, seemed very relaxed.  (Is he relaxed because he’s rich or did he get rich because he relaxed?)

We didn’t get a chance to talk for long but he suggested that I could learn more Japanese by reading his book.  I’m all over that like white on rice!  Stay tuned.

I’m going to keep it short, because today is the big day that I go to the Money Cultivation Course.

I want to pick up on a sentence from 1日３０分 that I copied as part of my ongoing process of learning Japanese.

「別に勉強といっても堅苦しく考える必要はありません。」

My dash of soy sauce interpretation:   You don’t have to think of studying as something formal, ceremonious, or stiff.

The key word is 堅苦しい (katakurushii) which means formal, stiff, literary, proper, and ceremonius.  The first character 堅 means hard, rigid, stiff, uptight.  The second character, 苦, means trouble, worry, difficulty, pain.

In other words when you think about the word study from now on, don’t get your undershorts in a bunch.   Change your mind or change what and how you are studying.  (Change your undershorts regularly too–you never know when you might be in an accident.)   Study can have a heavy connotation to it, but maybe the most effective studying happens when you become captivated by an issue or a process.

School isn’t something that just happens in school.   College dropouts like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs didn’t stop studying.   They changed the focus of what they were studying and created new possibilities and technologies by doing so.

Of course, you don’t have to be the next Bill Gates.   Follow your interests, take little bits of time throughout the day for the subjects and skills that make your heart sing.  Don’t worry, study.  Be a samurai at play.

February 24

My excitement and nervous energy are building up.   I am going to my first self-help seminar, in Japanese.   First, I have to celebrate the fact that I found the seminar at the Financial Academy.   I was flipping through ジャピオン, the local NYC free paper for the Japanese community, and was able to figure out that the seminar is designed to address the following issues:

Money Cultivation Course (Japanese Link)

“Who this course is for people who”:

• Even though they try each month, can’t save money
• Want to learn how to save, use, and increase their money
• Want results for their learning in a powerful two hour course
• Want to learn to save money in a relaxed manner.
• Want to learn how to save $300 a month towards investments.
• Want to learn how to save $100,000 in five years
• Want to learn how to speak to their partners about money and the future
• Want to study a money course that has been attended by over 140,000 people

“The reason you don’t know how to cultivate money is not your fault.  Here are the top reasons”:

• They don’t teach money cultivation in the schools
• There is a tendency to talk about money being “dirty”
• Without knowing about expenditures, investments, and income you cannot draw you “Money Map.”

“What you will Learn at the Financial Academy”:

• How to speak freely and comfortably about money, the economy, and investments
• How to manage your investments while breathing freely
• How to plan for having your own home
• How to breakthrough your financial worries

I’m not endorsing the course, but just by registering and reading the online materials, I feel like I’ve already gotten my $20 worth.  (Also, I heartily support anyone who teaches people to take control of their financial lives, as long as its done in an ethical manner.)  Plus, early registrants like me will get a free book.    It looks like their will be a lot of overheads and visuals so my kanji skills will help.   Of course, I can’t carry on a conversation in Japanese (yet!) so I am nervous about probably being the only non-Japanese person there.

As they say, I will keep you posted!

I picked up the Japanese version of I Can at at Sanseido, a Japanese bookstore in New Jersey.   The Japanese title of Ben Sweetland’s book is 自分を生かす　「魔法の杖」.  According to the internets [sic, man, sic] 生かす can mean:  to make best use of, leverage, capitalize on, to let live, or to resuscitate.  The subtitle means the magic wand.   So my inexpert translation would be Capitalize Yourself:  The Magic Wand.

I bought the English version for cheap on Amazon  (if you buy, buy used–at the time of this writing the price for a new version was $211 for some weird reason), and I am taking my time reading it, because it actually asks you to do some “work” as you read it and because I’m trying to stick to my goal of playing  in order to actually learn Japanese.  The Japanese version (2010) is obviously not a complete translation of I Can.  Last night, I skipped over the chapter about the physiological and psychological benefits of the slanting plank in the English version.  I guess in the 50 years since the last English edition, the slanting board hasn’t been a big hit.

However, the whole idea of Law of Attraction has been a big hit, as the success of “The Secret” has shown.  I’ve shied away from The Secret.  Not that I’ve got a problem with that.  No really, some of my best friends have read the The Secret.  However, the principal of my school includes quotes from different Secret books into our morning memo.

To be frank, at first, I was annoyed.  We live at a time when people’s rights are being assaulted, and it seems like feudalism is being reinvented and re-branded.   Schools are being disemboweled and democracy seems to be going to the highest bidders.   The idea of reading passages of The Secret seemed like whistling on the way to the slaughterhouse.

But the passages kept coming and I made a decision to let them in for a second, even just for the amount of time it took to read to my students.  The world throws out enough negativity, so why not just take a break from it and play with it.   (More recently, I’ve also been thinking that world changers like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. were able to change conditions around them not just because of their depth, but also because they radiated “positivity.”)

It’s in the spirit of a game that I am reading 自分を生かす　「魔法の杖 and even playing around with some of the ideas.　　Sweetland’s ideas about how to tap into the magic of the subconscious kept me reading and therefore I kept learning more Japanese.   一石二鳥　(one stone, two birds)!  In that vein, I will share the main sections in Japanese with my own translations (dose of soy sauce on my translations, please).

• 「人生の黄金の法則」意外に簡単に「夢は実現できる」Use the Golden Law to Easily Turn Your Dreams into Reality.
• 「欲しいものすべて」を手に入れる「人生の地図」Life-Map:  Everything You Want is In Your Hands
• 人生が驚くほど好転する「心」の話し方  How to Speak to Your Heart for Amazing Life Results
• どんな難問　「眠りながら」答えが出る！　　Solve Difficult Problems While You Sleep
• 「あなたの悩み」が必ず克服できる七ステップ　　　Seven Steps for Always Conquering Your Worries
• 「成功する人しない人」の違い　　The Difference Between Successful and Non-Successful People
• 「自分のための人生」をつくる四つの法　　Four Steps for Making The Life You Want
• 「魔法の杖」はあなたももっている！　　You Have a Golden Wand!
• 大勢を引きつける魔力のある人、ない人　　Why Some People Attract Many People, While Others Don’t
• 「記憶力は衰える」は幻想である！It’s an Illusion that Your Memory is Declining
• たったいまから、あなたの寿命は百二十五歳だ！　　From Now On Think of a Life-Span of 125 Years!

The basic message is that you can use the power of your subconscious mind to transform your life by learning to consciously direct its creative powers.   Books like this seem to be falling on my lap all over the place.  Recently, I found The Power of Your Subconscious Mind on the book- sharing shelf in the laundry room.

Right now I Can is just plain fun, especially because the English version is so retro.  Its “Thot-o-Meter” diagram explains that whenever your meter goes into the negative, you need to move it to the positive.  Does it work?  I don’t know.  I just started.  If you see me wearing a ring on every finger while hanging out with the Rolling Stones you’ll know it works :).