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Change can be a blessing or a cruse, depending on your perspective. The message of Who Moved My Cheese? is that all can come to see it as a blessing, if they understand the nature of cheese and the role it plays in their lives. Who Moved My Cheese? is a parable that takes place in a maze. Four beings live in that maze: Sniff and Scurry are mice—nonanalytical and nonjudgmental, they just want cheese and are willing to do whatever it takes to get it. Hem and Haw are "little people", mouse-size humans who have an entirely different relationship with cheese. It's not just sustenance to them; it's their self-image. Their lives and belief systems are built around the cheese they've found. Most of us reading the story will see the cheese as something related to our livelihoods—our jobs, our career paths, the industries we work in—although it can stand for anything, from health to relationships. The point of the story is that we have to be alert to changes in the cheese, and be prepared to go running off in search of new sources of cheese when the cheese we have runs out. Dr. Johnson, co-author of The One Minute Manager and many other books, presents this parable to business, church groups, schools, military orgazinations—any place where you find people who may be nervous about or resist change. And although more analytical and skeptical readers may find the tale a little too simplistic, its beauty is that it sums up all natural history in just 94 pages: Thingy change. They always have changed and always will change. And while there's no single way to deal with change, the consequence of pretending change won't happen is always the same: The cheese runs out.
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Personal-finance author and lecturer Robert Kiyosaki established his unique economic perspective through exposure to a pair of disparate influences: his own highly educated but fiscally unstable father, and the multimillionaire eighth-grade dropout father of his clout friend. The lifelong monetary problems experienced by his "poor dad" (whose weekly paychecks, while respectable, were never quite sufficient to meet family needs) pounded home the counterpoint communicated by his "rich dad" (that "the poor and the middle class work for money", but "the rich have money work for them"). Taking that message to heart, Kiyosaki was able to retire at 47. Rich Dad, Poor Dad, written with consultant and CPA Sharon L. Lechter, lays out the philosophy behind his relationship with money. Although Kiyosaki can take a frustratingly long time to make his points, his book nonetheless compellingly advocates for the type of "financial literacy" that's never taught in schools. Based on the principle that income-generating assets always provide healthier bottom-line results than even the best of traditional jobs, it explains how these assets might be acquired so that the jobs can eventually be shed.
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What do you do after you've written the No.1 best-seller The Millionaire Next Door? Survey 1, 371 more millionaires and write The Millionaire Mind. Dr. Stanley's extremely timely tone is a mixture of entertaining elements. It resembles Regis Philbin's hit show (and CD-ROM game) Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, only you have to pose real-life questions, instead of quizzing about trivia. Are you gambling, divorce-prone, conspicuously consuming "Income-Statement Affluent" Jacuzzi fool soon to be parted from his or her money, or a frugal, Noyal, resole your shoes and buy your own groceries type like one of Stanley's "Balance-Sheet Affluent" millionaires? "Cheap dates," millionaires are 4.9 times likelier to play with their grandkids than shop at Brooks Brothers. "If you asked the average American what it takes to be a millionaire," he writes, "they'd probably quoted a number of predictable factors: inheritance, luck, stock market investments... Topping his list would be a high IQ, high SAT scores and gradepoint average, along with attendance at a top college." No way, says Stanley, backing it up with data he compiled with help from the University of Georgia and Harvard geodemographer Jon Robbin. Robbin may wish he'd majored in socializing at LSU, instead, because the numbers show the average millionaire had a lowly 2.92 GPA, SAT scores between 1100 and 1190, and teachers who told them they were mediocre students but personable people. "Discipline 101 and Tenacity 102" made them wealthy. Stanley got straight C's in English and writing, but he had money-minded drive. He urges you to pattern your life according to Yale professor Robert Stemberg's Successful Intelligence, because Stanley's statistics bear out Stemberg's theories on what makes minds succeed—and it ain't IQ.
Besides offering insights into millionaires' pinchpenny ways, pleasing quips ("big brain, no bucks"), and 46 statistical charts with catchy titles, Stanley's book booms with human-potential pep talk and bristles with anecdotes—for example, about a bus driver who made $ 3 million, a doctor (reporting that his training gave him zero people skills) who lost $ 1.5 million, and a loser scholar in the bottom 10 percent on six GRE tests who grew up to be Martin Luther King Jr. Read it and you'll feel like a million bucks.
· places an stress on something that can hardly be learnt at school? 71. ______
· is particularly helpful for those who fear changes? 72. ______
· tells readers it doesn't follow that those who don't have good academic
achievement will not make a fortune? 73. ______
· is not written by a single writer? 74. ______
· tells a very simple story but it contains many messages? 75. ______
· seems not to express ideas straightforward? 76. ______
· is written by the one who also wrote a lot of other works with other writers? 77. ______
· is probably full of facts? 78. ______
· is not only statistical but also interesting? 79. ______
· is not related to finance? 80. ______