Hi everybody! Welcome to another episode of Wealth Unplugged – the podcast which gives you the diamond tips from my Feminine Wealth TV interviews so that you can learn quick bites from anywhere. In this week’s episode I interviewed Margaret Barry, founder of Bali Children Fund and expert on channeling resources for social change !
Here are my key takeaways from the interview:
Takeaway #1 – Persistence
We all think we’re persistent but most of us aren’t! Margaret had to really push through to achieve business success when she started in Bali and puts her success down to dogged persistence. In this day of instant gratification, many people are not cultivating resilience to the point where they will persist in order to succeed.
Takeaway #2 – You have to mine your opportunities
When opportunity knocks, you have to get off you ass and open the door! Be watching for opportunities and be prepared to take them. Some of the greatest opportunities are often lying within your own network – are you asking the right questions of the contacts and resources you already know?
Takeaway #3 – Sometimes you have to dream big – then you have to go and find the money to make it happen!
Decide on the dream first – it’s a great way of re-framing! Then go out and mine those opportunities with persistence on your side…
Transcriptions
Speaker 1: Want to know what successful people are doing with their money to create wealth and use it consciously for the greater good? Welcome back to Wealth Unplugged, the weekly podcast that gives you diamond tips on creating conscious wealth from change makers, world shakers, and wealth creators. Now here’s your host, Barbara Turley.
Barbara Turley: Hello, there, and welcome to another episode of Wealth Unplugged. This is the podcast where I give you some really key tips and strategies, amazing things that I pick up from the women that I’ve been interviewing on my Feminine Wealth TV show every week. I’ve had some phenomenal women on the show. Honestly, I have learned so many things from talking to these women over the last few months of doing this show, and then having to record this podcast a couple of hours later with my key takeouts, it really helps me to sort of focus on what are the key tips that I’m getting from these amazing women who are entrepreneurs, investors, philanthropists. I’ve had everyone on the show.
This show, this week, it’s quite an interesting one because I was on holiday last week in Bali. Bali’s quite near Australia, where I live. It’s just a five-hour flight away. I just love Bali because it has this kind of kickback, surfie, kind of relaxed vibe about it. Also, there’s actually quite a few Aussies over there and probably international, as well, who are running quite awesome businesses. I thought to myself, you know, while on holiday, why not get in a couple of shows while I was there, so I did.
I brought my microphone with me. I brought the camera, and I managed to interview a couple of really good, entrepreneurial women over there. One of the most interesting ones is one I’m going to talk about today. I found a woman called Margaret Barry, who is the founder and CEO of the Bali Children Foundation. I actually got introduced to her by another lady over there. It was just serendipitous that I met this woman. I’ve been thinking about bringing the element of philanthropy more into the show because I really feel, as part of my wealth/success map, I talk about this journey from deciding what your big dream is, and deciding what you really want to create in life, and the legacy that you want to live and to leave and going right through how are you going to create that? What’s stopping you? How are you going to invest your money, get your money working for you and to make it all happen?
The final piece of the puzzle is, actually, then when you make all that money, and you do become wealthy, what are you going to do with it? Because, you know, there’s people out there with hundreds of millions. Who needs that kind of money, really? There are really, really big problems in this world that, if we collectively get together and really harness the power of money in the right way, we can make massive differences.
I was very keen to find some amazing people to interview, to bring on the show, who are already doing this. Margaret Barry is a shining, shining, shining example of this. She is a female entrepreneur. She’s been in the rag trade for 30, 40 years. She started at her career in India, which, back in the 60s and 70s, it was a really cutthroat place to be in the rag trade. She started out, and she became extraordinarily successful working for another company, which, in the 80s, managed to make themselves into a $10,000,000 company. She was sort of leading the charge in that company over in India.
Then she made the decision to move to Bali and start her own business. Over the years, she’s had success in her own business there. She’s been, obviously, designing and manufacturing clothing there and selling them back in Australia. After the Bali bombing, which I think was in 2001, if I’m correct, or 2002, she realized that there was a lot of work that needed to be done in Bali, and that she realized the power of how you can change a nation when you bring people together, bring resources together, and bring a common cause together.
She saw this in action after the Bali bombing. When, actually, there was a huge evacuation effort. There was a huge recovery effort. It got her thinking about the things she could be doing to actually help a nation like Bali to actually grow, so she launched the Bali Children Foundation. She decided that, really, what she always says is the two ways to really create epic change, are trade and education. I absolutely, wholeheartedly agree with her there.
Trade is business. Business drives growth. Business drives wealth. Business drives money. Business drives connections. It drives resources. It drives all these different things. It drives creativity. Education is what can unlock a nation that is locked in poverty. Education and trade are the two things that are going to unlock them, but without education, you can’t really elevate to trade, I guess.
She looked at the Balinese culture, and she saw that, in North Bali, there was a huge amount, something like 15,000 kids up there that are disadvantaged and really don’t have access to any sort of educational resources or anything like that. She decided to start the foundation and start channeling money from the West and from businesses. There’s plenty of businesses in Bali that actually contribute into the foundation. Her own business, obviously, of course, as well, and has created unbelievable amounts of change in the last 14 years.
She now has 1000 children who have gone through the program. She has kids who have gone to University, you know, kids who came from families that live on $30 a month, and they’ve got a child going to University. I mean, that’s just incredible. I guess, to get onto my key takeouts … really, I was so excited by Margaret on the show … the first key takeout I really took from Margaret was this concept of persistence. I know it sounds like such a simple concept, and we all believe that we’re persistent. Actually, we’re not. When Margaret went to Bali, it was extremely, extremely difficult to launch a business there.
She said herself, “You literally couldn’t make a buck.” It was almost impossible to make a buck. I asked her how she kept going, you know, how did she actually succeed in the end? She said, “Dogged persistence,” was her thing. She made it work. She made it a success. She got through. I think, particularly in today’s world, I’m not sure how persistent we are. How many of us give up just before we reach the tipping point, just before the point at which we taste success because none of us want to work hard anymore? We’re all out for instant gratification.
You see these things of overnight millionaires, and I Can Make You a Millionaire in Six Months, and all that sort of crap, to be totally honest, and nobody actually wants to do the … I won’t say the hard work, because becoming wealthy is not necessarily hard. It’s not easy, but there’s a simple formula, and it does require a level of persistence, a level of trust and faith and resilience. I guess I talk a lot about having resilience as an asset for yourself in cultivating resilience.
I think resilience and persistence are sort of interlinked in a way. I really loved that Margaret has that quality. It’s the quality that meant not only has she made her own business successful, but she has helped that many children, and she has a very successful foundation. She has a board. It’s a full-on property organized. They’ve got massive fundraising events that happen every year. I mean, that take a lot of work to do it, but her persistence has really paid off.
That leads me onto me second key takeout. Again, I love this one. She said it a few times through the show, “You have to mine your opportunities.” Why I love that and the fact that she said it so many times is, I always talk about diamond hunting. In any of my programs … those of you have listened to the podcast for a while … you’ve heard me mention this concept of diamond hunting. Opportunity knocks all the time, and the problem is that people forget, when opportunity knocks, you still have to get up off your ass, and answer the damn door.
It’s amazing the amount of people who feel that they’re unlucky or that opportunity never falls their way. Opportunity is something that you have to mine. You have to have your eyes and ears open. You have to always be watching like a hawk. You have to know an opportunity when it slides its way under your nose, and that’s how you become a diamond hunter. That’s how you reach success.
What Margaret also said, in terms of mining your opportunities, “It’s also about some of the greatest opportunities are lying inside your own network. The people that you know. The people you’re friends with on Facebook.” She talked about this so intensely. I was so impressed by it because it’s a point that, I think, people don’t delve into enough. Again, like the persistence thing, I think people think they do, but they don’t.
Are you asking the right questions? Are you really mining the people that you know or the contacts you have? The resources that you do have, even if that resource is not money, you always have other resources, other contacts, other ideas. You even have your own energy and your own creativity to come up with new ideas. Always make sure that you’re just thinking from the opportunity perspective and from how you’re going to mine opportunities because they are everywhere. Opportunity is knocking every single day on every single person’s door in this world. The people who get up and answer the door are those who are successful.
That brings onto my third, and final, key takeout. It’s one, again, such a powerful. Margaret said it, actually, at the end of the show. If you go and watch the show, make sure you watch it right to the end because she actually makes this comment right at the very, very end, when I was just about to wrap up the show. It was so powerful. She talked to me about the fact that I always say to people, “Get your money pumping so that you can feel your dream,” and that makes you feel more alive.
She reframed it in a beautiful way that I just loved. She said, “Sometimes you just have to dream really, really big because then you’ve got to go out and find the money to make it happen.” It sort of flipped that on its head for me, and I like that concept where she goes, “You know, decide the dream. Don’t worry about the money right now, just decide the dream because then you’ve got to go out and find the money to make it happen. How are you going to do that? Then you start mining your opportunities.”
It’s this sequence of events where dream big. Figure out what it is you want. Figure out what it is you want to change. Figure out how much money you’re going to need or what resources you’re going to need. Then go out and mine your opportunities. Most of all, be persistent. Have persistence and resilience on your side.
As you can tell, I mean, I just thought it was such a powerful, powerful interview. The thing is for me personally, I walked away going, “You know, I think some of us are born with a natural bias towards these things.” I always dream really, really big. I always talk about diamond hunting; although, I’m starting to think now, “Am I mining all my opportunities? Am I really?” It got me thinking, too.
Am I being persistent enough? Am I giving up too early with certain things? A lot of things there to think about. I think if all of us would take those three key takeouts, write them down, and ask ourselves, “Are we truly being honest with ourselves when we say, ‘Yes, we’re doing those things,'” because I reckon we can always do more.
What I’ll finish on, again … Actually, after the interview, I was chatting with Margaret in the car, and she talked to me about the fact … I asked her what her big vision was. What’s her huge vision? She said, “I want to change a nation,” and I thought, “Wow. How many of us would dare to dream that big? How many of us would even think that the power of one person could do that?”
Again, I want to urge you, if we get wealth into the right hands and we get people thinking differently about connecting the world of wealth with the world of need and the world of solutions to massive, global problems and nations that need help and people, if we can connect those two things together successfully, we could really change this world. I’m going to leave you on that note for this week.
If you love this show, I would really love if you’d share it with some of your friends because I think getting this message out to more people would really light my heart up. Also, if you’re listening on iTunes, you can subscribe to the show either on iTunes, or you can subscribe on PodOmatic, or some of the other podcasting directories.
Also, if you could leave us a rating and a review, it would really mean a lot to me if you did that because it helps to get the show up the rankings. Also, if you’re interested in knowing more about the wealth/success map that I talked about earlier, you can jump on over to my website, energisewealth.com. You can download the wealth/success map right there. I urge you to do it because it is a new way of thinking about wealth. It’s very simple. It’s foundational, and it gives you the map that you need to build on.
Next week I’m doing another Bali interview, actually, with a friend of mine, Ness, over there, who moved to Bali, has had many businesses over her life. She is now doing a jewelry business out of Bali. I just love the way Ness morphs and evolves and changes over time. She’s really fluid. She’s a fluid creative, and I really want to get her on the show because she can make anything work. Honestly, she can make anything work. Until then, have a great week, and I’ll talk to you next week.
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