Don't Make Assumptions by Gidget Giardino

Don't make assumptions. Boy, that statement could not be more true. 


You've probably done it yourself more than a hundred times. I know I have. But, in reading the book The Four Agreements, I am seeing the error of my ways and have been thinking about the instances where I ASSumed something about someone and was shocked to learn how wrong I was.


In my young entrepreneurial days I belonged to the Fort Lauderdale Kiwanis Club. We were having a lunch meeting at Red Lobster (when there used to be one on 17th Street Causeway.) My dad and I had just pulled into the parking lot and parked our car when an old clunker of a Station Wagon pulled in beside us. I watched in disbelief as a man got out and walked over to greet my father. The man had on 1970's clothing, and this was in the late 1980's. There were little holes in his collared shirt and the pants were stained and a bit tattered around the bottoms. 


I had assumed he was there for some other reason and NOT for our Kiwanis meeting. But, he walked in with us and, as it turned out, was seated right next to me. The topic of this particular meeting was a project to collect donations for children whose parents could not afford eyeglasses for them and for children in the foster care system. We developed a plan for accomplishing our goal and ended the meeting. As we sat around chit chatting with each other I witnessed something I've never seen before. The man who came in with us and sat next to me, the same one who looked as if he could not even afford the lunch he had just consumed, pulled out his checkbook and wrote a check in the amount of $10,000. 


Needless to say, I almost fell off my chair. 


I could not wait to get out of there to ask my dad who the heck that was! What I learned was the man was a multi-millionaire. Some relative had invented a filament of some sort that was used in creating the flash for cameras and he received royalty checks from that invention. He himself was a simple man who did not feel it necessary to walk around keeping up appearances. Rather, he chose to do good with his fortune and live a very modest lifestyle. 


The lesson stuck with me, but somewhere along the line it's message was watered down by time and influence. So, now that I am building a Network Marketing business it has come to light that making assumptions is detrimental to my financial growth, and more importantly... it's detrimental to others as well!


Don't make assumptions.