Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening depending on when and where you're tuning in from.  This is episode nine of The Blue Collar Executive podcast.  I'm your host Lewis Taulbee, Jr.  Abraham Lincoln once said, “give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening my ax”.  Now there's a man that knows how to prepare.  I think I'm prepared for this episode so let's see where it takes us.  Keep your fences pig tight, horse high and bull strong.  That's an old farmer saying that I've heard a million times.  Like all farmers statements though you have to look for the meaning in the unspoken words.  Let me translate this one.  Be prepared.  When a farmer builds a stable or a fence for his pasture, he may only need to put a horse in it that day, but he builds it in preparation for any need he may have in the future.  This is what I want to talk about today.  Not only preparing for what's right in front of you, but being prepared for any opportunity that might come your way in the future.  Growing up, I dug a lot of postholes and I always knew better than to cheat on the depth of any of them.  I followed this philosophy throughout my whole career.  When I became a licensed electrician, I learned that 80% of HVAC issues are electrical.  I learned the other 20% to add value to myself and it paid off.  I was given more opportunity and better pay.  The shopping mall industry is another great example of this necessity today.  As we know, there's been a drastic change in the way people shop.  If I had spent the last 25 years of my career solely focused on retail real estate, I'd be in trouble right now.  Fortunately, I've always added new tools to my tool belt and took advantage of every opportunity to be involved in different types of real estate.  Now while we are redeveloping those dinosaurs, I have it covered from every angle, which gives me greater value for my career.  I have a friend that was a columnist for a newspaper.  He's just a little older than me, but he always refused to give up that typewriter and use a computer.  He would always say I'm old school and I don't need to learn that new-fangled technology.  He was a great writer, but unfortunately the newspaper business was changing with or without him and because he's unable to cast his articles electronically, he no longer has a job.  Webster's dictionary defines preparation as the action or process of making ready or being made ready for use or consideration.  That sounds very accurate to me.  We have to prepare ourselves to be ready for use or consideration.  If you're going to work every day for just the paycheck, you're not giving yourself any benefit.  When you go to your job, don't ask, what am I getting here?  Ask what am I becoming here?  The greatest personal value in life is not what you get it's what you become.  This is important so let me say it another way.  It's not what you get that makes you valuable, it's what you become that makes you valuable.  So even if you don't like your job, look at how you can gain something more than a paycheck from it.  I know many people that are great workers, but if their boss asks them to do something outside of their job description, they refuse.  That's not my job they'll say.  Come on.  Change your mindset and realize that the boss has given you an opportunity to increase your value.  Change your got to get.  Don't say, I got to do this.  Say I get to do this.  Look at King David.  He was anointed King as a child, but he had a tough bootcamp.  For many, many years before he became King, he was a warrior, an army leader, a fugitive and he could have said at any one of those, that's not my job.  He recognized that each one of those was another step on the ladder preparing him to be King.  My dad played music as I was growing up.  I spent many weeks at bluegrass festivals.  When I was about 10 years old, there was a band I like called The Boys From Indiana.  I guess by now they're the old men from Indiana.  At the time they were all young guys and always so kind to me as a kid.  They would let me come onto their tour bus and watch TV.  I was just so amazed at those large tour buses.  We arrived in a pickup truck with a camper in the bed.  One day when I was on their bus, I started messing around with a guitar they had.  One of them looked at me and said, hey you're going on stage with us in the next set but you have to go ask your dad first.  I was so excited and ran as fast as I could to ask my dad, just knowing that he would be excited too.  I was shocked and disappointed when dad said no.  Now he was busy rehearsing with his band and didn't give me an explanation.  When I grew up, dad didn't need to give me an explanation.  No meant no and I knew better than to ask again.  That evening on the drive home dad said you're not ready.  He then went on to tell me that he had seen many musicians fail because they stepped onto the stage before they were their best.  I didn't really understand it then but I later saw what he was saying.  When you step on that stage in front of a thousand people, you have one chance to make that first impression.  They will either want to hear you again, or they will never want to hear you again.  Dad's favorite riddle to say to me was, do you know how to get to Nashville son?  Practice, practice, practice.  It's like when the Israelites got stuck in the wilderness for 40 years because they would not prepare themselves to move on into the Holy Land.  They spent every day so focused on what they were going to eat and drink and do for that day that they were never prepared to move on.  It's just like when dad told me I wasn't ready, God told them they were not ready.  I had the choice of doing nothing and never playing outside of my house.  Just like they had the same choice of staying in the wilderness or preparing their butts to cross the Jordan.  Now when I hear the word preparation, first thing that comes to my mind is sports.  To be successful in any sport preparation is by far the most important factor.  My high school football coach had a reputation for being tough.  If you ever played for him, you would agree that that's a huge understatement.  He would start two a day practices in the hot humid month of July and he pushed us hard.  If you didn't vomit at least once per day, you weren't pushing yourself hard enough in his eyes.  So you'd get to stay later.  We ran every play over and over until we could run it to perfection.  Some days I would get there at 6:00 AM and would not leave til 9:00 PM.  We worked like that for two solid months.  When that season started and we jogged out under those Friday night lights for the first time, we were ready.  Not only were we ready, we won.  In fact, in all the years that he coached losing was a very rare thing.  Some would say he must have been a genius play caller or a great strategist.  Nope.  In fact, we only had a handful of plays.  That had never changed in a decade.  We won because he prepared us.  When we stepped onto that field, we knew what we needed to do and how to do it to perfection.  When I coached baseball, I used to always tell my team that the team that wanted to win the most would win.  But the real truth behind that statement is not the will to win it's the will to prepare to win.  The bottom line is that the key to success in any sport or business is preparation.  No matter if you're painting a wall, building a city or playing a baseball game, you have to put in the preparation to succeed.  In life we not only need to prepare for what we're doing.  We have to prepare for the next opportunity so we are ready.  Every professional athlete will tell you they have to spend a tremendous amount of time preparing themselves mentally and physically for the next game.  That's what they have to do to be successful against their competition.  Did you know that 65% of pro athletes are bankrupt within five years of retiring?  That's because they didn't prepare for the next opportunity.  Success occurs when opportunity meets preparation.  So do your job and earn your paycheck but stay focused on adding value to yourself.  Then when opportunity shows up, you'll be ready.  Thomas Edison once said, “Unfortunately there seems to be far more opportunity out there than ability. We should always remember that good fortune often happens when opportunity meets preparation.”  Have you ever noticed when somebody scores big or has great success, there's always someone else saying, wow, they got a lucky break or they lucked into that opportunity.  Call it luck but if they hadn't been prepared when the opportunity came along, they wouldn't have been lucky.  If we're preparing to run a marathon, we should prepare by running every day, or preparing to win a doughnut eating contest we should be overeating every night.  The point is it's much easier to prepare when we know exactly what we're preparing for.  However, we need to be prepared for any opportunity that may come our way in the future.  If we do that by always looking for ways to improve ourselves, mentally, physically, and spiritually, by praying, reading, learning, working out meditating then when that opportunity arises, we're ready.  Be ready for tomorrow by doing all you can today, or as dad would say, dig your well before you get thirsty.  I'm going to leave you with one last Abraham Lincoln quote.  Abe said, “I will prepare and someday my chance will come”.  I certainly hope and wish for each and every one of you that someday your chance will come and when it does, you're prepared.  That concludes another episode of The Blue Collar Executive podcast.  I hope you found some value in it or at the very least found it entertaining.  Thank you so much for listening.