In 2003 I became a full-time entrepreneur by leaving my job in sales and starting Balloon Distractions. I was 29 years old, and at the time many people around me thought I was taking a huge risk.

In reality it was the one of the smartest things I’ve ever done.

Suddenly I had my time back, I no longer had to answer to a boss, and I could determine my own destiny.

The last 12 years gave me time to spend with my wife and children, go to Honduras on several mission trips, serve in leadership in the local Rotary club, and read countless books on history, success, and philosophy.

In 2010 I even spent a month in Taiwan with my wife.

I’ve had the time to do what I wanted to do, when I wanted to do it. When my daughters were in elementary school I could have lunch with them in the middle of the day on a Tuesday, when most other Dads were punching a clock.

In January of 2014 I got the chance to pitch Balloon Distractions on national TV, only to get yelled at by Barbara Corcoran and Mark Cuban. Good times!

After Shark Tank I wrote my first book; We Twist for Tips. Copies of my little book are selling all over the world, mostly as downloads on Kindle.

Each month the modest commissions from We Twist for Tips appear like magic in my bank account, you gotta love Amazon! The commissions are small, but my book will always be out there, a small record of my time on earth and my adventures as an entrepreneur.

When I started my Life Leadership business I was able to build it around my Balloon Distractions obligations, as I write this post both businesses are profitable and I’m on track to totally pay off my mortgage before my 43^rd birthday.

How many people working a regular job are able to pay off their home at 43 years old?

As I became a student of the LIFE material I began to see how several myths are perpetrated by mainstream society, and how there is an agenda that has been set in place by certain specific interests, an agenda designed to trap the middle class in a matrix of debt and dependence upon a job.

MYTH: A job is the way to go, starting a business is too risky.

TRUTH: It depends on the business. Starting a business and risking your life savings is risky, but there are many low start-up options out there for anyone who wants to start a lucrative side business.

My only cost to start BD was some balloons, an apron and the gas used to go out and pitch restaurants. As the business grew I invested our profits back into travel and designing some software to run our systems, our best year at BD we grossed almost 800K, this all sprung from selling one restaurant and twisting up $10 in balloons for a free tryout.

It currently costs about $135 to start a compensated community with Life Leadership. For around $300 per month (in overhead costs) you can run a LIFE community that generates a high six-figure income.

It was actually far riskier to start BD because I had to figure out everything and create the systems from scratch; from scheduling and billing to training, selling, and recruiting.

LIFE is easier because the systems are established already, and I have a mentor that earns over 100K per MONTH who has been guiding me since 2014.

MYTH: There is good debt and bad debt.

TRUTH: All debt is cancer, get rid of it as fast as you can.

I bought my home here in Florida back in 2003 for about $160,000, on a 30 year mortgage. Each month the principal paydown is currently $350, while the interest is a whopping $520!

If I take the full 30 years to pay off my home I’ll spend a total of $315,000, for an item that originally cost less than half that amount.

I’m in year 12 of my mortgage, by paying it off in the next 24 months I’ll save over $100,000. That 100K would otherwise go to the mortgage company.

MYTH: You’ll always have a car payment.

TRUTH: You can buy a car for 3K cash and save the difference.

Consider what happens when you buy a modest used car for $3K and sock away $300 per month towards the next car, instead of paying a car payment. If your 3K car lasts 4 years you’ll have almost 11K in your car account, and you can stroke a check for a better vehicle. There are a bunch of great used cars out there for 11K.

I bought a 2006 Toyota Avalon for 12K, it had 72,000 miles on it, it’s been an awesome used car. I’ll drive it to 200,000 miles (or more) before I need to replace it, and the next car will be paid for cash.

My wife will earn a high income this year as a real estate agent, she drives a 2010 Prius that we found used for 11K. Great car, great gas mileage.

MYTH: You need a fancy degree from an Ivy League school to be successful.

TRUTH: The wealthiest people (in my circle) who have built the largest businesses either do not have a degree or they have a degree that has zero correlation to their current success.

My friend Bill owns a marketing firm in Philadelphia and earns a 7-figure income. He barely finished high school. My mentor in Life Leadership got a degree in physical therapy, but that has nothing to do with his success in building compensated communities.

Granted, you need an advanced degree to be a lawyer, doctor or engineer, but the quality of your work after college is far more crucial to your success than where you earned your degree.

Elon Musk is a billionaire because of what he learned after college, not during. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of school. Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Edison were all largely self-taught.

The college system is a multi-billion dollar business with tuition costs that have gotten so extreme that student debt in the United States now exceeds over a trillion dollars.

I graduated with a degree in Economics in 1997 with about $6,000 in student debt, my first year out of college I earned $38,000 selling insurance for Mutual of Omaha. I paid off my debt pretty fast, but what about the kid who graduates in 2016 with $80,000 in student debt only to earn $50,000 their first year?

I told my daughters that they are not going away to school unless they get scholarships to pay for it. I’d rather my daughters commute to a local school and graduate with little to no debt.

MYTH: I’ll work my safe and secure job until I reach 65 and collect Social Security.

TRUTH: Technology is speeding up, and the skills you bring to your job today might not be relevant in a decade. As I share the LIFE business plan with people all over Tampa Bay I’m hearing the same story over and over again, mostly from people over age 50:

“I reached the top of the pay scale and I was downsized.”

“My manufacturing job was exported to Mexico / China / Indonesia.”

“They eliminated my accounting position and outsourced it to India.”

You don’t really control your job, but you can control your business. I’m building a compensated community to create a residual income that will continue even when I’m old and grey. One of my mentors is 67 years old, and his LIFE income is about $8,000 per month. He owns his LIFE business, no one can downsize him, and he can even will the business to his children.

I’m not counting on “Social Insecurity”. With 10,000 new Baby Boomers retiring every single day the funds will eventually run out, or the government will postpone the retirement age to keep the program going.

Who knows? I turn 65 in 2039. By then they might raise the retirement age to 75, or maybe I’ll have to turn 80 before I’ll ever see a check. I’m not counting on it.

Instead of depending upon the government in the year 2039 I’m going debt free now and building a business so large that I’ll have enough income to live 200 years without going broke.

MYTH: To start a business I need to be a great salesperson, and true entrepreneurs are born, not made.

When you were a baby you had to learn everything, from walking to talking to feeding yourself. Entrepreneurship and sales are acquired skills, as long as you speak at least one language fluently you can become better at selling, building relationships, and growing your business.

MYTH: All those networking things are illegal / scam / etc.

TRUTH: There have been networking companies that rose fast and fell hard, normally because of a lack of integrity on the leadership team. But there have also been many standard companies that did the same, from Enron to MCI Worldcom.

On the other hand there have been networking / direct sales companies that have lasted for decades with tremendous long term success, from Avon to Mary Kay.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) closely watches the direct sales / networking industry and shuts down the opportunities that do not comply with the law.

When I share the LIFE business plan I always leave the Income Disclosure Statement (IDS) with my prospect. The current LIFE IDS is 19 pages long, complete with statistics on member renewal and average income numbers of real members at each level.

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Be careful about what you believe to be the truth, especially if you are not where you want to be in life.

The truth will set you free, but you also have to be open to accepting it, even if the people around you may not agree with you.

-Ben Alexander

December  11, 2015

As a little kid I used to build wooden stilts and totter around my parents yard in New Jersey.

Later on I met Jason Szabo, a vastly talented performer here in Tampa who can draw, twist balloons, and perform on stilts.

Jason let me try on his professional stilts and I found out that I could still balance and get around.

A week later I bought a pair of stilts in a pawn shop and put together the Uncle Sam outfit you see pictured above. That was from a 4rth of July parade in 2014.

The Uncle Sam pants have an inseam that’s 8 feet tall!

Walking on stilts is a weird thing to do, but so it starting a balloon company, building a LIFE community, teaching English in Taiwan… or going to college to study opera.

It’s pretty easy to take a traditional path in life, work in a traditional job, and live a life that is conventional.

But that might not be as much fun.

This is why I left the job world and became a full-time entrepreneur when I was 29 years old.

Owning a business has been stressful at times, and I’ve screwed up lotsa stuff, but it has also been more fun than working at a traditional 9-5 job. I’ve twisted balloons for countless children, and I still enjoy seeing the reaction on their face when you make something they’ve never seen before!

You have to keep an open mind and look for ways to have fun.

I’m gonna go rollerblading, see ya!

-Ben Alexander

November 2015

TV personality and comedian Tim Allen has a great method for setting goals.

He writes down 3 sets of goals: Lifetime, 12 month, and Daily.

This is a brilliant approach, because your daily activities contribute to your 12 month goals, which then lead to your lifetime goals.

This grid tends to focus your daily activities in the right direction.

A big lifetime goal is like constructing the Great Wall of China, you have to build it one daily brick at a time. Minor efforts compound over a lifetime.

Daily efforts also lead to eventual mastery.

Draw up your own grid, write down your own goals. It only takes about 5 minutes.

About 1 in 100 people actually write down their goals. And in that group far fewer take action on a daily basis towards their goals.

Success is doing now what others are not willing to do so that you can have in the future what others do not have.

If you have a daily activity that takes away from your lifetime goals get rid of it. I deleted my Facebook account back in May because it was a huge time suck. Now I spend more time reading and writing.

I left the local Rotary club because the money I was spending there was going against my plan to pay off my home by my 43^rd birthday.

When I’m debt-free I can always rejoin Rotary, if they’ll take me.

It took me until I was 41 years old to finally find my focus, my purpose, and a clear path to get where I want to go.

Build your goal grid, do something different from the crowd!

Have a great Labor Day!

-Ben Alexander

September 7, 2015

PS: Whatever your goals happen to be you can get there faster with a daily dose of personal development. I’ve been a student of the Life Leadership training since 2014, I highly recommend it:

More info on Life Leadership:     http://www.lifeleadership.com/61414939

Last week I was working with our team in Atlanta and I found myself a few blocks from the Ebeneezer Baptist church and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Center, on the east side of the city. I’ve been through Atlanta many times over the last 15 years, but I’ve never visited the Center. I’d encourage you to go, there are several excellent displays and a comprehensive documentary that you can watch in the theater, at no charge.

I spent 3 hours there, then walked through the birth home of MLK Jr., and bought a book entitled: Great Speeches of African Americans. The book starts with speeches given by abolitionists in 1843 through the Civil Rights movement, up to Barack Obama’s commencement address at Knox college, delivered in 2005.

You can not call yourself a true student of leadership or history until you have delved into this dark chapter of our collective past. I have tremendous admiration for the brave men and women who risked life and limb to change society for the better, they could have stayed home and played it safe, but they choose to go out and face police in riot gear armed with tear gas and Billy clubs.

Leadership by example, indeed!

Before you read further take a moment to view this historic video:

It’s been over 50 years since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered this speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It was broadcast across the United States, and represented a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement.

The genius behind “I Have A Dream” is not just in the creative imagery, but also the scope of MLK Jr.’s vision for the future. When he stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 the American South was embroiled in violent racism; lynchings, bombings and open murder against African Americans, even on camera in front of a network television audience.

This is footage from the “bloody Sunday” protest in Selma:

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Despite all of the darkness and evil surrounding him MLK Jr. saw a future that was brighter for his children’s generation. He knew that he was in the crosshairs of evil, daily death threats were leveled against him, yet he saw the Civil Rights movement as something far larger than his own physical well being.

He had been stabbed by a demented woman in New York in 1958 at a book signing, narrowly escaping death.

In several speeches after 1958 he makes references to his own mortality, hinting that he may not live to see the realization of his life’s work. He continues to lead and speak and travel anyway:

MLK Jr. died for his cause in 1968, shot on a hotel balcony by James Earl Ray, an ex felon, pornographer and racist who had worked on the George Wallace political campaign that openly supported segregation.

In many ways Martin Luther King Jr. led his entire life as an act of love towards every future minority in the United States who would have to face racism, prejudice and unequal treatment… merely because their skin is darker than others.

We are all just varying shades of brown, really.

There are still ingrained problems with racism in our country, if Barack Obama were 100% white I feel that his opposition would have a different tone altogether. I do not agree with all of our President’s policies, but I still accord him the respect due to his office.

There is still violence and hatred in our inner cities, from Baltimore to Ferguson.

There is still redneck police brutality, matched in kind by rioters ready and willing to burn down businesses in their own neighborhood.

There is still generational poverty and ignorance, on both sides of the racial divide.

As stated in the Book of John: “And the Light shineth into the Darkness and the Darkness did not comprehend it.”

If you are an educated person you can help roll back that ignorance by reading and studying this era in our history and telling others about it, you can shine your light into the dark corners of hatred and do your part to eradicate it forever.

In our own actions we can seek to understand and love others, just as Martin Luther King Jr. did during his brief lifetime here on earth.

-Ben Alexander

August 25, 2015

PS:  If you truly want to accomplish something BIG I would encourage you to become a student of leadership. There is a top- notch leadership program offered by Life Leadership, check it out:

More info on Life Leadership:     http://www.lifeleadership.com/61414939

Can a car company demonstrate integrity?

Recently I got a letter in the mail about a recall on my 2006 Toyota Avalon.

Apparently there was a defect in the plastic used to cover the dashboard on several models made during that year, causing cracks when the dashboard was exposed to heat and sunlight.

I knew this all too well, when I bought my used Avalon (Limited model) $12K it had 72,000 miles on the odometer and visible cracks in the dashboard. Back in 2006 that same model retailed new for $35,000, so the cracks in the dash didn’t really bother me. I’d rather buy a great road car with a few miles on it for $12K compared to full retail on a perfect model!

My Avalon now has 141,000 miles on it, it has been a perfect road car, with a ton of room, a great engine, and it rides down the road as good if not better than any of the Lexus models I owned previously. The Avalon is not sexy, but in terms of needing a reliable car for building my business it has been perfect.

Because of the recall Toyota is replacing my entire dashboard at zero cost!

What impresses me is that Toyota does not HAVE to spend this money to make me happy.

The dash cracks were not a safety or health issue, there are thousands of Avalon models on the road with the same problem, yet the owners are probably like me and just accepted it as a flaw one invariably discovers finds in any used car.

I respect the character and integrity demonstrated by Toyota in fixing something that would simply make their customers happier.

Now I have an Avalon with 141,000 miles on it and a perfect interior!

This is one of the reasons I continue to buy used cars under the Toyota / Lexus brand and will continue to do so.

The Avalon recall tells me that someone in leadership at Toyota is looking at success in the long term, they value the relationships with their recurring customers (like me) and they know that spending a couple hundred bucks on a repair now will reap a long-term customer over the next few decades.

There is no place for short-term thinking if you desire any type of long term success.

-Ben Alexander

August 18, 2015

Have you ever gone bowling and the bowling ball swerves into the gutters?

It makes bowling a strike about ten times more difficult.

I don’t like the gutters, they are the bane of my bowling alley existence!

The last time I was at the bowling alley I saw some young children bowling and they had these little Gutter Guards that deployed from the side of the lane and prevented the ball from going into the gutters.

What a great idea! If I went bowling with the Gutter Guards up I would be the best bowler in the universe!

Finding consistent success in life is very similar to bowling with huge gutters on either side of a very narrow wooden lane that stretches 400 yards long.

Each time you have a setback it’s just like bowling a huge gutter-ball!

I’ve bowled a ton of gutter-balls in my day: problems with the IRS, getting into debt, messing up relationships, making poor decisions, drinking to excess, etc.

Of course, the only way to totally avoid gutter-balls is to never bowl!

But what if there was a way to put up Gutter Guards on the bowling alley of your life?

You might not bowl a strike every time, but your chances of actually scoring are far higher.

After I went on the show Shark Tank I began plugging into some great training created by LIFE Leadership, a company based in Cary, NC.

The Life Leadership training system acts like Gutter Guards on your path to success.

I became a better husband, my debt started to evaporate, and alcohol is totally absent from my life!

Thank Goodness!

I’m not perfect, I still have a ton of growth to go, but I feel like my path to a greater success is THAT much clearer now.

The Gutter Guards are in place, I just have to keep bowling!

-Ben Alexander

August 15, 2015

More info on Life Leadership:     http://www.lifeleadership.com/61414939