<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/em> (Jeremiah 1:5)<\/p>\n I missed sending out a \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcPurpose Weekly\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/em> letter last week. Elaine and I went away for four days so I could write \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 ironic, isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t it? There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a book I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been putting off for a while now and the story is going to outrun me if I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get on it, so I did. I got a good start last week \u00e2\u20ac\u201c at least I got a good idea of a good start. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll keep you posted.<\/p>\n Speaking of books, I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know if I ever told you why I started True Potential Publishing, Inc. six years ago, or this \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcweekly\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/em> newsletter almost four years ago (wow! \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 has it been that long?). If I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve already told you the story, humor me, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m going to tell it again.<\/p>\n Elaine and I were married in 1982 and we moved to South Carolina, Elaine\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s home state, in 1983. The day we arrived at our new home, a 1930\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s frame farmhouse with no heat (I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m lying; it had electric baseboard heaters in the main room, we just couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t afford to turn them on) with all of our worldly possessions in a U-Haul trailer and one month\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s rent paid in advance, I tallied up our cash reserves which came to a grand total of just under fifty bucks, plus a collection of around 2,000 pennies in a Sparklettes bottle. I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even want to think about the credit card debt we hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t figured out how to pay off.<\/p>\n We were real close to broke, in a new (for me) place, no job, no skills, no prospects. Two weeks later, after we had just blown through our penny stash, I landed a job cleaning carpets on nights and weekends. It wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t steady but it put gas in the tank and bought meager groceries. Several months later Elaine\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dad, Monroe, set me up with an interview for a job at a manufacturing plant. I had never seen the inside of any sort of manufacturing plant and I think the guy was just trying to do Monroe a favor. I got hired at $3.50 per hour and was told to show up on Monday and find a place on the floor to fit in. It was a start. I believed if I could just get my foot in the door, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d figure things out. Elaine got a job in accounting at Montgomery Ward (remember them?); we put our heads down and went to work.<\/p>\n Twenty years later we raised our heads to look around. I still worked in a manufacturing plant (two, actually), but now my name was on the door, and on the mortgage. Elaine was still in accounting but it was our money she was counting. And I had stopped saving pennies a long time back. We weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t rich by a lot of standards, but compared to that first South Carolina afternoon in 1983 we felt like Warren Buffet and family.<\/p>\n Like I said, we looked up. For the first time in twenty years we asked ourselves why we were doing this. We knew the answer in the beginning \u00e2\u20ac\u201c survival. But survival hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t been an issue in a while and we just forgot to stop working. There had to be a new reason why we were doing this \u00e2\u20ac\u201c was it success? I guess a lot of folks would call it success; it sure looked that way from the outside. But for us it didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t feel that way on the inside. There were no reasons why<\/em> we were doing what we were doing that were good enough for us to keep doing it. What we were doing and the reasons for doing it didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mean<\/em> anything \u00e2\u20ac\u201c at least they didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mean enough<\/em>. That day we decided to sell the company and the buildings and do something that meant<\/em> something.<\/p>\n But what?<\/p>\n At eighteen the notion got into my head that I wanted to be a publisher. I had no background, no education, as far as I knew, no talent. I had no idea what function a publisher actually performed. I liked to write (I thought I liked to write \u00e2\u20ac\u201c one actually has to begin writing to know for sure) but that was about it. I had this vague eighteen year-old concept of the glamorous and fulfilling life of a publisher, based on nothing more than \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 well, based on nothing.<\/p>\n By the time I reached forty-six I had scraped together an education and had gained some quasi-experience writing through my sporadic journal entries over the last twenty-five years. I still had no clue as to what a publisher actually did<\/em> for a living but the hankering had never left me. We were going to stop<\/em> manufacturing and start<\/em> publishing! <\/span>Good luck.<\/p>\n My work experience over the previous twenty-years had ended up with me spending a lot of time in sales. And to be a good salesman, I studied all the popular sales literature and listened to all of the success tapes. These \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcmotivational\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/em> guys all had their own twists on the subject of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dchuman potential\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/em>, but when I boiled it down, it was pretty much the same message \u00e2\u20ac\u201c \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcget what you can, get as much as you can; try to be happy<\/em> (or at least comfortable) in the process, and if possible, try to make your family happy too\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/em> (it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s funny \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a lot of the success guys I studied were working on their third or fourth marriage \u00e2\u20ac\u201c I guess they hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t perfected the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcmake your family happy too\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/em> part). In a lot of ways their \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcsuccess\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/em> message was okay, but like my job, it wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t enough. I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t interested in their personal patented version of success<\/em> and their funky, vague, new-age concept of human potential<\/em>; I was looking for the real<\/em> meaning of success \u00e2\u20ac\u201c true<\/em> potential.<\/p>\n <\/span> <\/span>True Potential? \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6hmmm \u00e2\u20ac\u201c maybe we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got something here.<\/p>\n Anyway \u00e2\u20ac\u201c that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how it started. I would research \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcTrue Potential\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/em> and write a book on what it means to be truly successful. Now, almost six years later we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got us a publishing company (not big \u00e2\u20ac\u201c about forty titles and a half-dozen authors) but still no book on \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcTrue Potential\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/em> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not the one I started writing last week.<\/p>\n But that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s about to change, and we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re going to start right here. There are, as near as I can understand, about twelve facets of a truly successful life. And really there are only two that are essential \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the other ten are bonuses that make the relatively short time (eternally speaking) we spend on this planet more productive for you and more pleasant for those around you. For the next twelve weeks \u00e2\u20ac\u201c I promise not to skip \u00e2\u20ac\u201c we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll touch each of these facets of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153True Potential\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/em>, starting with the most important first.<\/p>\n I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll give you a hint for next week: read Deuteronomy 6:5.<\/p>\n Until then, be blessed (you really are, you know?)<\/p>\n Steve<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Jeremiah 1:5) I missed sending out a \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcPurpose Weekly\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 letter last week. Elaine and I went away for four days so I could write \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 ironic, isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t it? There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a book I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been putting off for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6,15],"tags":[225,863,845],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gotpotential.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gotpotential.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gotpotential.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gotpotential.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gotpotential.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/gotpotential.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":555,"href":"https:\/\/gotpotential.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544\/revisions\/555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gotpotential.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gotpotential.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gotpotential.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}