About two weeks ago, I attended a 2-day seminar called “National Achievers’ Congress 2006″. During the two-day seminar, 7 speakers from around the world enlighten us with their experience and knowledge in their area of expertise. The two main speakers were Jim Rohn and Dolf De Roos.

Speakers at the congress from left to right:
Jim Rohn, Dolf De Roos, Scott Friedman, James Skinner, Ron Kaufman, Tom Hua, Brett McFall

The knowledge which they have imparted to me is absolutely priceless. I have never read any of Jim Rohn’s book, but I know he’s a famous business philosopher and author of several best-sellers. I find him a man of wisdom, the stories he shared about his experiences were mind-blowing. When he was in his mid twenties, he was broke until he had to lie to a brownie girl guide selling cookies because he didn’t have the money to buy from her. That was a life-changing experience for him because he decided to change and never feel that way ever again. I found a video on youtube.com of Jim Rohn sharing his experience with personal development revealing valuable essentials to becoming wealthy in mind and body. Click here to watch the video.

Dolf De Roos is a real estate investor and also one of the author of the Rich Dad’s Advisor Series, I thought his book “Real Estate Riches” was a total bore and he’d probably be a boring speaker too. Turns out I was wrong, he was incredible! It’s very obvious that he knows his stuff well, I’m re-reading the book now that I’ve seen him talk. He’s a little guy who talks with confidence. After he gave a few of his financing strategies, a few people questioned his strategy saying it’s impossible in Malaysia. He was a bit pissed and said something along the lines of “Fine! You are just proving yourselves right by arguing with me!”. Soon after that, a few students or readers from the audience went up to the microphone to give their success story. I think most of the skeptical audience changed their perception after the students gave their testimonials.

The other speakers are Scott Friedman, James Skinner, Ron Kaufman, Tom Hua and Brett McFall. Scott talked about using humour in everyday life, the tips he gave are unique:

Tip #1: Celebrate the first stress of the day
Tip #2: Profanity with a twist
- He suggested to list all of the profane words and number them. So whenever you start swearing, you’d say the number instead of the words e.g. “Shut the 8 up, you 2 5. I can’t stand your 1-ing 4!”
Tip #3: Call your own home answering machine
- When you have a bad day, call home and let your answering machine pick up and rant away.

I like tip #3, if only I had an answering machine….

James Skinner’s topic was “Lessons I Learn from Moving a Billion Dollars”, at first he started talking about how wealth has something to do with metaphysics blah blah blah and used our local accent. I thought he sounded weird. Then midway he said he wasn’t insulting us with his accent since he’s stayed in Singapore for some time, it has become a habit (Singaporean English (Singlish) accent is pretty similar to Malaysian English (Manglish)). However, the next half of the talk, the accent disappear. Anyway, it wasn’t till the last half of the talk that got interesting. He emphasized money is actually just an idea, he told us a story about a person who quit his business because of lousy partners and was laid back about his finances even though he was in trouble. Instead of worrying about his finances, he saw a nice mansion on a magazine which he wants to own and called the dealer to ask for the price. The mansion was more than a million dollars and he paid downpayment by mortgaging his mother’s house. Then he started looking for ways to pay for this house and saw a big piece of land in the city area and proceeded to look for the owner. He negotiated a free option on the land and sold it to pay for his mansion. Fiction or not, I don’t know but his talk about money was extremely enlightening. I wish I can give you a better picture of what he said, he was challenging my mentality most of the time.

Ron was very entertaining, but I thought his concepts about customer service is pretty common. I have never read his books, perhaps the speech duration was too short for him to elaborate.

I think Brett and Tom Hua’s session was the worst, because they were doing purely sales pitch. I felt very disappointed because I was looking forward to their topics about online business. I guess it’d be hard to talk about the technicals to the crowd, since the audience aren’t all tech-savvy. Not all is lost though, they did give a few ideas that I’d like to give a try.