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ONO, a Delicious Place

What if you had many options about how you spent your time and you had plenty of money to do whatever you wanted?
Ono is a Hawaiian adjective that means delicious, in terms of food. My mom grew up in Hawaii in the Fifties and Sixties on the outer islands where things were still pretty Hawaiian. There weren’t many tourists; everybody was “family,” lots of sun, lots of fun, and lots of great, great food. If you’ve ever been to Hawaii, or if you’ve ever had a chance to hang around with Hawaiian people, you know that they LOVE good food. That’s what a luau is all about: ono food, good fun, and good people.
So, you ask, what does “good,” as in “delicious,” have to do with a success strategy? Well, how would you like to be at a place in your life where you could spend your time doing whatever you wanted?

• What if you didn’t have to worry about making enough money to support your family or to meet your other obligations?
• What if money, or the lack of it, was no longer making decisions for you?
• What if that time came sooner rather than later?
• What if you had plenty of options about how to spend your time and plenty of money to do whatever you wanted?
• What if you had Options, Not Obligations? That not only spells ONO, it is ONO.

What are Obligations?

Obligations are all the things in your life that require action, time, money, or any combination of the three. There are obligations you impose on yourself like working out, going to church, or visiting grandma. There are financial obligations: mortgage or rent, insurance, utilities, childcare, and all the other bills you work so hard to pay. You have other obligations, too, like going to work, cooking meals, doing housework, and taking care of your possessions.

Dissect one week of your life. If you think about what you do and where you spend your money during one week, you will probably get a good sense of what your obligations are. Now think about how much of that time is spent doing what you choose to do, what you want to do, as opposed to what you are obligated to do. Added together, you will probably see that our obligations take up most of our time and most of our money.

What About Options?

Let’s switch perspectives. Imagine that you had enough money to do what you really wanted. Imagine yourself with options. Options could be things like spending more time raising your children, being a better spouse, going fishing on a weekday, getting fit, growing a garden, or pursuing a lifelong dream. No matter what your ambition is, obligations can hold you back from fulfilling it. If you had enough, or more than enough money, wouldn’t your obligations then become options? You could choose how to spend your time.

Better yet, what if you could make money:

• If you wanted
• When you wanted
• The way you wanted
• As much of it as you wanted, or
• As little of it as you wanted?

You can have Options Not Obligations at any income level, but at the lowest levels you may have to live in a cardboard box and ride a bike. If you limit your lifestyle enough, almost anyone can have ONO, but most people want more than a box and a bike. That’s the cool part—you get to choose. I want you to realize that the road to ONO does involve sacrifice, but my hope is that if you adhere to sound principles, you won’t have to sacrifice too much.

The Road to ONO

How do you get to that place I call ONO, that place in your life where you’re free to take advantage of the finer things in life without the obstacle of obligations standing in your way? How do you get there? It takes money. You need enough money to be free of the demands it makes on your time.

If you were at a place of choice where you could choose the way you spent your time, where money was not making decisions for you, if you were at a place of Options, not Obligations, wouldn’t that be delicious? Yep, I thought so.

Where ONO Came From

I’m not a writer. I’m a talker, a public speaker, in fact. I’m also a reader, a voracious one, but not a writer. This is not a disclaimer; it is an explanation of how this book came to be. It came from conversations.

The idea for the title of the book was born during a conversation with a friend about being in a perfect position in my life. I had a slew of options and was unrestricted by any financial obligations.

The book’s words, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters grew and matured, were hashed and rehashed, were clarified and solidified, in conversations. I did what I do well; I talked. I made appointments with colleagues and friends, held deliberate and purposeful conversations with them, and then I recorded the conversations.

The content? I’ve been carrying parts of it around inside me since I was a boy. The rest is the result of a fifteen-year quest to learn how to be a success in life, not only a success in business, but also a success as a man, in relationships and in spirituality.

Building the content of ONO is the story of building my life. You see, I’ve been very fortunate; two big factors in my life, both of which some people might consider stumbling blocks, have been critical stepping-stones in my path to success. They determined the way I acquire information, and the way I look at it.

Dyslexia

The first is that I have a diagnosed learning disability. I am dyslexic. It caused me quite a bit of grief in school but has been a blessing in other parts of my life because when I distill information for myself, I cut to the chase. I discard the irrelevant and the unnecessary and find the gems that work for me. I make complex concepts simple, understandable and workable. I have read hundreds of books on all sorts of topics, listened to hundreds of tapes and CDs, and talked to hundreds of people. I broke down the information I gained from them so that I could digest it and use it.

My disability has been a God-given gift. It allowed me to create easy-to-understand systems for myself: business systems, life and marriage systems, and belief systems. Those systems make up the content of this book. They reflect fifteen years of my life, years I spent gleaning, distilling and implementing them.

Alcoholism

I encountered the second stepping-stone when I was in my teens. I became an adolescent alcoholic. When I became sober at age twenty-two, I was blessed with the opportunity to “remake” myself. I was able to choose new friends, set goals, learn to be a good man, and live my life with purpose and with joy.

In the “remaking of Marc,” I became very aggressive in my mission to learn from the wisdom of others. I looked for people who seemed to be doing it right, and I found out what they were doing and how. I tried their methods and adapted the ones that worked for me to build my own financial, personal, and spiritual success.

As a result, this book is a distillation of the ideas I acquired from many sources. I intend to present them to you as methodologies of thought, not action.

A New Way of Thinking

I need to be very clear about this from the outset. This book was not written to teach you “how to do,” but rather to teach you a much more valuable tool, “how to think.” Let me give you two examples of what I mean.

First, I am a firm believer in mentors. They are an invaluable source of information and assistance. Mentors have had a huge impact on my life; they have taught me some useful tactics and strategies. But, more important than the tactics and strategies were the insights I gained by paying attention to the reasons behind what they did. It was important to me to learn not only why successful people did what they did, but also how they thought about each situation.

Learning how to think in business was by far the most valuable lesson I ever learned as an entrepreneur because no two situations are ever the same. I learned to wrap a thinking style around my decisions that took into account all the variables. You will encounter many similar situations, but the variables will be unique to you and your life. My goal is to give you important background information that will help you make better decisions in your business dealings no matter what the variables are.

Second, I am also a firm believer in reading for information. There are millions of entrepreneurial opportunities available to you and all of them have been dealt with in great detail in hundreds of how-to books. Bookstores are loaded with titles like “How to Invest in Real Estate,” “How to Start Your Own Business,” “How to Make Money in the Stock Market,” and the list goes on and on.

I have gleaned a lot of useful information from books like these, but found that one key element was missing from most of them, which is how to think about the process. I had to read between the lines to find the insights I was looking for. Now I am passing those insights on to you. I don’t want to merely teach you how to fish, I also want to teach you how successful fishermen think, which is much more valuable.