Business Coach

Andrew Carnegie

Articles

His goal: Wanting to retire by age 35 with at least $50, 000 per year
income from His investments and give the rest of his money away to
educational efforts.
His obstacles: Education, The Civil War, coming from a very poor
background.

Andrew Carnegie came over from Scotland at age 13 (1848) with his
family because of financial hardships there. His father was struggling
to earn enough money to support the family. He was making $1 per
day weaving cloth. So Andrew’s mother got part time work sewing
shoes. Andrew got his first job as a bobbin boy replacing bobbins in
the looms and earned $1.20 per week and gave most of that to his
family. Two years later he got a job delivering telegrams at $2.50 per
week. As he was delivering telegrams he made a lot of business
contacts and they all respected him. The telegraph machines produced
a tape which then the operators would read and translate. Andrew
heard about an operator who could listen to the machine and write down
the message as it came across. This saved a lot of time. So he
learned to do this. He was promoted to operator and was making $25
a month at age 16. When he was 17 he started to work for the railroad
sending and receiving telegraphs and was earning $35 per month.

The invention of the rail road sleeping car came about and he was
allowed to buy a 1/8th share in the company. This investment gave
him money to make other investments later in oil, and iron to build
bridges, rails and steam locomotives for the railroad.

By 1868 he had achieved his first goal. He was earning over $56,000 a
year from his investments. This was at a time when big business men
earned about $5,000 a year. He kept building his businesses so that in
the year 1900 J.P. Morgan bought up all of Andrews businesses for the
sum of $480,000,000. In today’s dollars that would be several Trillion
Dollars.

The rest of his life he was looking for good causes to donate his money
to. He built many libraries around the world. He was a big proponent
of peace so after WWI he pushed for the League of Nations and also
donated $1,500,000 to the Palace of Peace which housed the
International Court of Justice at the Hague.

How many times have you used excuses as “I don’t know anything
about that”, or blame your background to get out of doing something.
Here was Carnegie who started out with nothing and became the richest
man in the world. With the wealth of knowledge in books there should
not be any reason that you couldn't’t learn what you need to know.
Just because you have a degree from High School or College doesn't
mean that you can stop learning. Every day you should read and learn
something new. Those who don’t read are no better off than those who
can’t.

A coach will keep you motivated and help you get over your excuses.
Your coach will help you stay on track and when you have to go away for
a while they will remind you to get back on track and not to get
completely derailed.

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