With very few exceptions, business owners include a depreciation schedule when they file their taxes.
We become very familiar with these forms. They are black-and-white evidence of the relentless loss of value.
Brian Tracy he points out that there is perhaps an even more important item that continually loses value that never shows up (at least directly) on your depreciation schedule: Your ability to earn.
If you’re a business owner, some of the assets you depreciate year-after-year can impact your ability to earn and the lesson here is that you must continually be assessing upgrades to your means of production.
A friend of mine is a fan of the History Channel program Mountain Men. One of the “mountain men” profiled in the show has a sawmill in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s actually an antique sawmill, more than 100 years old.
There is certainly some appeal to using old equipment and doing things the way the old-timers did them, but none of that appeal has anything to do with productivity and earning power. My friend once mused that the original owners of the mill probably put it out to scrap when a better model hit the market, yet this mountain man refuses to upgrade.
So, don’t be some kind of “mountain man” who is reluctant to change because “we’ve always done it that way around here!”
That’s not the most important point I want to make however. Here’s the message I’d like you to take to heart: Just as your equipment can become obsolete, so can you!
If you don’t make a concerted effort to improve your knowledge and skills, business practices will pass you by. And, with the pace of change today, your earning power can depreciate at a faster clip than ever before in history.
You must adopt Nike’s attitudinal slogan of “Just do it” and apply it to your willingness to acquire new skills and knowledge…and not just today, but also tomorrow, the next day, the day after that, and so on.
With the Internet, conferences, and so many universities reaching out to business leaders today, the availability of avenues for growth are incredible. Be sure to get yourself plugged in!
This critical concept of continual improvement is also central to my book, The One-Percent Edge: Small Changes That Guarantee Relevance and Build Sustainable Success (affiliate link). While I don’t solely focus on personal development, I “take apart” your business function-by-function and show you how to find ways to make continual improvements.
That’s the way to reverse your earning power depreciation!
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