Dream and Hustle

Your Elevation is Based on Your Attitude, Ambition, and Association

Tuesday, January 24, 2023

If there is one thing I experienced with wisdom as I get older and older is fundamental truths will always stay fundamental truths. People can fake it, people can take it, but people cannot fulfill it until they are right within themselves to truly appreciate and understand the throne of power.

It always comes down to three things that are going to determine how far you can move in this globally competitive economy. Those three things are your attitude, your ambition, and your association. I can tell you right now, the last one – the association is what destroys people's scalability of their dreams 99% of the time.  

Let’s discuss the three attributes.

Attitude

Your attitude is how you view and think of yourself (internal) and the outside world (external). My thoughts are internal attitudes like self-esteem, self-worth, or self-doubt at the end of the day are irrelevant and meaningless. The reality is you are a mortal that can die at any given time, for any given reason. Once you accept your fate, then you must also accept the pursuit of a purpose and meaning for why you are alive right now.

Having an attitude to the world outside is something you simply cannot control. You cannot control people in power making self-interested decisions consequential to your situation. You cannot control natural disasters and events like war, viruses, and weather events. You cannot control your inner circle if they don’t support your journey or like to talk about you behind your back.

What you can control is your reaction and response through your attitude. You should always live your life believing you can find a way forward. Never take anything personally, see it as a life event that you have to figure out how to handle or use your skills and experience to address the situation at hand. Trust in yourself that you got this and don’t hand your resolve to anybody else or depend on anyone else.

I see it all the time, we got people who want to express negativity and doubt, not realizing the person with the right attitude is not bothered or cares about such expressions. The person with the right attitude sees adversity as a challenge they going to have to figure out how to overcome. When I have a new challenge in how to code or implement a business workflow, I don’t get overwhelmed. Instead, I break everything down to what I know, what I don’t know, and where I want to end up.

That attitude is what keeps me going where if the solution is to remove a toxic family member from my life, they are gone. Or if I have to implement some new business process, I have the ability to learn it from a book or the internet the stuff I don’t know or seek advice from someone who does know. My attitude is there is always a way forward and that’s how you progress in your journey.

Ambition

The word ambition has a simple meaning to me; either you are scared trying to play safe or you are going for it all and going big. No matter how you feel about Donald Trump, he was a man of ambition – he went big on his buildings, and went big on whatever he worked on including running for President. Most people are scared and try to scale down their ambitions to their level of fear and safety.

Fear and safety will never get you any awards and it will never allow you to beat your competition. If you are not as ambitious as your best competitor, then you just looking to grab crumbs and it is obvious why a person like that will never make it. Because the most ambitious competitor will use their ambition to take out their weak competitors.

You have to go big meaning that you have to meet your best competitor at the minimum, not necessarily better. Think about Japanese automobiles in the 1970s when they didn’t have to compete with American V-8 engines and American luxury details. The Japanese had ambitions to sell cars that were lower cost, better reliable, and practical for the daily driver. Big ambitions require knowing you don’t compete with a competitor for the people, you meet the people's optimal needs of what they really need, what they can really afford and the value proposition is good enough to buy that Datsun Z instead of a Stingray Corvette.

Association

This factor is the number one determining factor. Doesn’t matter if you have attitude or ambition, if you choose poor-quality associations, you will never live up to your dreams and purpose.  You must make it a priority in your life to only associate with those aligned with the journey of your goals. The most important thing is only choosing associations personal to your journey.

Bad associations are what destroy the young adult generation's global competitiveness and I see it in real-time from a global perspective. A lot of people have associations based on emotional context – this person makes them feel motivated like Andrew Tate or Gary Vee's speeches for example. If someone needs an emotional speech, they don’t got what it takes to step into the arena and win rounds to final victory.

Another bad association is friends and family – they do not always have your best interest at heart unless you are all in business together with the same goal. If you have a family where it was promoted someone is the smartest out of all the brothers and sisters, get the heck out of that toxic relationship and go build on your own and build your own family out. A lot of people stay around their toxic family members who are quietly killing their dreams by forcing them to believe in family dogma instead of chasing their individual purpose in this world.

The worse association I have seen in my lifetime is racial affinity such as Black identity as an African-American. These are Black people who want to believe they can point and judge and determine the best Black, and worst Black and throw anybody with a skin color into their artificial construct of racial identity – yes, that is the definition of a racist. Then you got fools joining in saying this Black person, that Black person while you see people around the world working together like India and Japan, Poland and the UK, Israel and America, working together collaborating on businesses, research and development while African-Americans still talking Black this, Black that and don’t have a clue other around the world passed them ahead by light years in the meantime.

If You Want to Be Somebody Else, Change Your Mind

Many of you want to become a bigger and better version of yourself to get to bigger and better places. If you want to be that person, then you have to change your mind. You have to change your attitude, your ambition, and your associations.

That should always be your core development and focus right here, right now. I had clowns thinking they can adopt Dream and Hustle stuff while enjoying Dr. Boyce Watkins's garbage and wondering why they got nothing today but a computer keyboard to type lies online gaslighting they handling things, they are not and we know it. Stop fooling yourself that you can have it both ways by faking a good attitude in public but you have a bad attitude behind the scenes. You have to be true to yourself.

My company, The Manufactured Solution was built with an optimistic attitude, big ambitions, and global association with a huge customer base of entrepreneurs with the same high level of determination. My company solutions will not work for those who don’t have their way of thinking straight, they will say what I’m doing is over their head and they are correct – they don’t have the right attitude, ambition, and association to handle The Manufactured Solution and I don’t need them as customers either.

My customers are go-getters who make money and can pay our invoices with ease. So it is important that you understand why I’m writing this article and hope people can change the way they think about themselves, their journey and how big the opportunity is out there so we can all come out winning and winning big. 

Contributor

Ed Dunn

From Chicago West Side to Worldwide