“For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.” - Luke 12:48 KJV

“Today we have learned in the agony of war that great power involves great responsibility.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt

Much of my blog topic is about money and wealth. With wealth comes power. Even though some of you may not agree, I believe that success and power are very close, and if not, one and the same. Why I say this is because we generally gage success on how much power or choice we have in our own lives. The more money we have often determines how much power we have in society.

Aside from money, there is such a thing as influence to power. Some times the poorest of people can influence people in high places to make decisions.

As one of the wealthy, you have access to things lesser wealthy people don’t. You have at your disposal, money mangers and people who can take care of your estate, in turn increasing your wealth. You may also have access to investments that the poor don’t. For instance, the ability to invest large sums of money in ventures that have a great potential for return.

With money comes the ability to turn the tables, buy men’s souls, and even “influence” the law. Even though they believe that they’re getting away with murder, they fail to grasp the fact that they’ve sold their own souls.

This temptation is the test of everyone who has great power.

My opinion is, if you have the power and money to elevate your family and the people you know to a greater well being, with out crossing moral and ethical standards, then why not? You SHOULD feel the need to use your power as long as it does not hurt other people.

The problem with people who want money, but don’t want to deal with the responsibility of it, are never ready to receive it and, as a result, their power is short lived.

My question to you is, if you were put into the position of being able to do anything you wanted, without immediate consequences or the hard work involved, what would you do and would it interfere with your moral standards?

Do you understand the gains and rewards to for staying true to your moral and ethical standards?

If you were given an extra $200k today, what would you do with it?

Do you seek knowledge to learn how to handle power or do you see money as a renewable resource, with no need to save, invest or plan ahead?

The true test of a man is to give him power.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Simply put, you don’t have to be hugely talented to do very much.

The rich, and the New Rich especially, are among the least talented. Accumulating money is actually pretty simple, you sell, they buy. Then once you get past that, you want to step it up a bit. You sell a lot, they buy a lot. They’re happy, you’re rich.

The Excuse(tm), Do You Make This Mistake?

I’m too short, too tall, too old, too young, not enough school, I don’t have a CPA, I don’t have enough time, I wasn’t born rich, I’m happy this way, I’m not sure/undecided, blah blah blah!

The guaranteed method to cut off all forms of prosperity from your life is to kill it before it even has a chance to grow. Another way is to put it off until you either die or the opportunity passes you bye.

5 Sure-Fire Attitudes To Guarantee You Die A Slow Death And NEVER Get Rich:

1. You need to have some grandiose idea that sweeps the world by storm!
If this isn’t the dumbest attitude about business ever, I don’t know what is. So much time, money and energy is WASTED by trying to invent some useless product that should be a no-brainer for everyone to buy, of course, “because it’s MY product, and my products have special magical powers that outsells everything out there.” This is such BS and it frustrates me when I see people pouring themselves into creating an amazing product that really doesn’t have any market value.

I’m sad to say it, but these people really aren’t entrepreneurs. They’re inventors who have a passion for building, publishing, baking, etc. They have unconditional love for their work, but don’t understand that not everyone is going to recognize their product’s value in the same way that they do.

They’re inventors, posing as entrepreneurs, pitching an inventor’s unconditional love for their BABIES to investors who expect an entrepreneurial valuation. Two different people, in two different worlds who speak different languages.

2. ASSuming the value of a business before it even has a chance to grow.
If your business worth $500,000? Is it worth $1 Million? $10 Million? There are several ways to valuate a business. It’s probably a good idea not to valuate a business on your own, at the very beginning. “This is too much like asking a mother how talented her child is.” says Susan Ward.

3. You need to be smart and talented.
I don’t know any really really smart business owners. Like, people who have an IQ of 170 and have 2 PhDs, an MBa, CPA and every other degree under the sun.

Most business owners need to be smart in a few specific, critical areas. The first is being able to handle and lead people. Being able to influence a sale to strangers. Pushing themselves to do things “smart” people are often too scared, or too smart, to do. It takes a unique view of the world. It takes persistence, guts, and courage. Emotional strength as well as physical. Being able to spot opportunities and handle failure.

Yes, the “talented” people often coast on their talents. Not feeling they need to develop themselves. Don’t make this mistake. No top performers have ever coasted without a good reason.

4. It Has “Great Potential!”
In an entrepreneur’s world, if it doesn’t make money, it’s not a great idea. I’m either making money or losing money. Potential is overrated. Everything has potential, few things actually sell. Few business actually get going because the owner gets frustrated when they don’t get rich overnight. When everyone doesn’t grab up their product. Potential is what it is, it’s just THAT. It’s like energy in dead wood, you need to light a match to get a fire going. If you don’t get the fire going, the energy alone won’t do anything.

5. Being Attached To Idea Like A Third Arm, Never Letting Go.
Let’s face it, some businesses are never going to go anywhere. They’re either marketed wrong, or there’s just no need for the product. I don’t buy things I don’t need or want.

Some products you can’t give away. When this happens, drop it like a hot coal, throw it away, tare it up, forget about it, erase it from your memory before you waste any more time on it. We know it’s your baby. You’ve raised it, you’ve put in the hours, sacrificed for it, dreamed about it…and NOW…it’s like a dead fish, you try to revive it, but you need to face the truth, it’s dead. Fry it up and eat it.

The Lazy Man’s Way To A Business That Works: Leave Your Ego At The Door

Let’s get something strait. You’re business is not your baby. Your business is not a work of art or a keep sake you keep in a hope chest for fond memories.

Your business is NOT a “sure-thing.”

Rather, treat your business like these two things: Your business is like a relationship. There needs to be the love, the passion, the attraction(feeling good about what it has to offer) and it requires commitment and energy. But eventually if there’s just no way that it can work out, you have nothing else to do but to end it, turn around and get on with your (career) life. There’s always something much better out there.

Another analogy that is perfect for business is that your business is like a vehicle. It’s good as long as it gets you there, doesn’t cost too much to maintain, and is relatively safe. A vehicle is only good until it’s outlived its years and has given all it can give. Maybe you get into an accident and the vehicle gets totaled–it costs too much to keep and get repaired. Maybe it’s time for a new one. What ever the case, you can always have more than one vehicle…just as many as you can handle.

The lazy man’s way to success in business is building businesses that you can turn on auto-pilot. You can create or buy multiple auto-pilot businesses and have multiple business incomes.

The lazy man’s way to business success is to stop stressing about who’s business it is, how it works, who gets what, etc and to copy and model other successful business entrepreneurs who have been there done that.

I don’t care about great ideas, or product or inventions. I love ideas that make money. I want to build businesses. And in business, I’m only concerned with what works. Because business is where the cash is at. Cash is where the lifestyle is. If you want to create lifestyle you need cash. The best vehicles for creating cash are businesses.

The real entrepreneur knows he doesn’t have a lot of time on earth to accumulate wealth and build successful businesses. He doesn’t stress about ideas with great potential or get over attached to a business he put his heart into. To the real business entrepreneur, money is money, value is value and a business is only as good as the value it creates and the money it makes. Successful business people are copy cats, they leverage other people’s experiences and failures to learn what to avoid. Poor business people are trying to come up with original ideas and methods for getting to success, that way they can brag about how they did it alone. Real business people understand the power of leadership, leveraging and OPT, OPM–other people’s time, other people’s money.

Maybe it’s just me. I don’t know. Maybe I’m lazy because I don’t want to spend 10-20 years creating one business. There are way too many books, speakers, role models, coaches who can teach me how to do it in half the time. It just doesn’t seem fair not to take advantage of that fact.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Everywhere you go now days you get charged more than seems fair. And then what about your bills? Cell phone bills, rent,  water bills, car insurance, gas, cable…internet…for love of Pete, FOOD! I say that most people who are in business are loosing the game because they undercharge, they undersell themselves.

I’m guilty of doing this. I’ve treated my time like it’s worth $8 an hour. So I started raising my fees, caring less what people think and giving deals only when there was no other way.

My cell bill was $300 this month. When it hits you below the belt you start getting pissed off and caring less about what people think about your rates. Just start charging what you’re worth, not 25% or 50%. Why do most people always end up at ZERO after paying bills after every month? It’s simple math, they ask more than we do and we end up with less.

It’s not that everyone’s overcharging, it’s just that you’re undercharging.

Money comes to those to ask.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Photo by scottburnham
“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” – Henry Ford

The word “team”, instead of staff, has become popular among many organizations now days and corporate leaders and entrepreneurs are understanding why teams are important. The days of management and carrot and sticking is slowly but surely coming to an end. It has far outlived its time.

Personal Weaknesses

John C. Maxwell, one of the world’s experts on leadership, says that strong teams compensate for individual weaknesses. Everyone has special strengths and talents. But no matter how talented we are we’ll always have weaknesses. A strong team goes through self-assessment and finds strong points in the their team members. They then coordinate and use these strong points to compensate for members with weaknesses. For example, a web design firm would assign technical tasks to people are gifted in technical areas, presentations would be given by people who are gifted at presenting, design would be given to people who are good at design, etc.

The Power of Leveraged Time

The real power of a successful business probably shows its teeth in the way it leverages OPM, OPT. What do big businesses have that sole proprietors or one-man-shows don’t? They know how to leverage man power! I really got excited about this idea when I first really “saw” and understood what this meant. It’s so simple that the world class seem to be the only ones who want to leverage it.

Take for example you work as a self-employed gardener. In the morning, you need to water the plants, open the store, and set anything else that needs setting up. During the day you have to water the plants, be the cashier etc etc. At night you need to close the place down and do whatever else needs doing. You’re the entrepreneur and the technician, the brains and the labor, the person who makes or breaks your business. But lets say you got tired of standing behind a cash register, so you hire someone to take over that area. Now your business has 32hrs of potential man power(lets say a potential 16hr days at max). With the extra time it gives you, you start getting time to think about innovating your business. You add on a little to the green house and set up for plants. The problem is now you’re working even harder than you did before. So you hire someone to take care of the watering and tending to the plants. That now gives your business a potential 40+ hours in a day. Plant sales are good so you add on even more, hiring two more people to take care of customers and other tasks that need doing. You add another 32 hours to your day, that’s almost 65+ hours in one day. Needless to say, 65 hours per day impossible for one person. That’s the power of leveraging.

24 x 1 = 24hrs (limited cash flow, bus factor of one, if you get hit by a bus your business does to)
24 x 2 = 48hrs (Already impossible for one person)
24 x 5 = 120hrs
24 x 10 = 240hrs
24 x 100 = 2400hrs (is that time management or what?)

Synergy, when the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

When people work together an interesting phenomenon happens. Stephan Covey talks about this in his book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Synergy is a dynamic type of state where 1 + 1 = the power of 3 or 4 or more instead of 2. The word synergy comes from the Greek word syn-ergos, which means to work together. Covey explains it as, “When the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” Synergy works in all areas of live, not just business. Synergy works when people work toward a common goal. Take for example a brainstorm session, one person might not have any ideas … until sitting down with another person, then idea begin to flood from both of them as if there were 10 brains brainstorming.

It was like the two brains tapped into a higher form of intelligence and both ended up complimenting and inspiring one another. It wasn’t two brains thinking anymore, it was one super mind. Our minds are wired for communication and when we do so they work like magic.

Interdependence Paradigm

7 Habits of Highly Effective People is one of the best books I’ve ever read on personal development. It’s the basis of much of my thinking and has been for a few years. A powerful lesson I learned from this book is that we’re all interconnected. Stephan Covey considers co-dependence the highest stage of maturity. He explains that the first stage is dependency, we’re born into this world and have to depend heavily on our parents, teachers, etc to survive. Next comes independence, the stage at which we begin to think individual thoughts and depend on our own reasoning instead of seeking advice or support from the people we depended on as we grew up. The final stage is co-dependence, understanding that we all depend on each other and, in some way, we’re all interconnected and if one link in the chain loosens others are there to fix it. Co-dependence often exists in organizations, intimate relationships like dating couples or married people. It exists in communities, government and other such groups. Co-dependency is acknowledging that you alone can’t accomplish anything great alone.

“No one man can accomplish great things alone” – Maynas Eric Chua

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

This photo is courtesy of Red Stick Republican’s Rantings
Goal setting is not a one time activity, it’s a skill that, with much practice, can be mastered. Some people set better, on target, goals than others. It can be a very simplistic process, if done right. If you do it wrong you can confuse the hell out of yourself. It pays to learn how to set goals. Thousands of books, audio tapes, CDs, seminars have been made on the topic of goal setting. Avoid reading and listening to ALL of the material out there, obviously you won’t live long enough. Instead get advice from the best selling business and personal best practices authors out there like Brian Tracy, Stephan Covey, Jim Rohn, Zig Ziglar and Tony Robbins just to name a few.

There is really no right amount of goals, some people set 500 a year and other set 2-3, most people set none. Some people like to set small goals so they can check something off every day so they can build up momentum to larger goals. There are also those people who think 20 years down the road before they achieve any of their goals.

I use a system for tracking my progress and just started using it recently. In order for this system to work your goals NEED to follow these guidelines:

Smart Goal Setting Guidelines:

1. They need to be written in the present tense and personal(I–or we if you’re an organization–am/have/own(present tense) …)
2. They need to be measurable(e.g. I have grossed $120,000(specific amount) this year)
3. They need a deadline(e.g. Jan 1st 2011)
4. They need to be specific(WRONG: I have gone on vacation…RIGHT: I have taken a vacation with X in X resort as of June 12th 2010)
5. It needs to be meaningful
6. You need to be clear on how to get there(at least have an idea on the first step or know someone who you can model)

Quick Note: The Best Things Come in Three’s

One is not enough, four is too much to focus on. You should not focus on more than tree goals a month. The fewer goals you have per month, the sharper your focus. There’s only 30 days in a month, don’t plan on changing the world within that time. Three goals is just right. Like I said above, there are no “right” amount of goals. However the less number of goals you have and the more meaningful they are, the surer you can be that you will accomplish them.

The Monthly Review–Be Accountable

What happened if you set goals and never checked the progress? You might not get there. Why? Because it’s easy to stray. It’s easy to set a goal and forget about it in three weeks. This is important: KEEP YOUR GOALS IN FRONT OF YOU DAILY!

SideNote: There is a common opinion in psychology that says that the brain can’t differentiate between internal references(like constructed and remembered images) and external references(things that, in the life out side of you, actually happen and you pick up on through your senses). There’s a major difference between merely reading the words, of the goals you’ve written down, and the seeing and feeling them in your mind before they happen; we know that from many reliable sources, as well as the new discoveries in quantum physics, that say that the subconscious mind is always working to live up to the self concept you choose. When you write down goals on paper your subconscious mind comes up with ways to achieve them, I believe that this is where intuition and bursts of creativity come from. We all know though, that what you focus on expands. When you talk about, think about, and dwell on your ideal future, you begin to find your self working towards it.

Five to ten days before the end of the month do a monthly review on how far you are from your monthly goals. If you set a goal for the 31st and it’s currently the 22nd, review your progress:

CASE 1. Didn’t achieve goal but made progress:

1. How far am I from X goal? (Use some math if there are numbers involved to get a percentage)
2. How much did I do vs. Averages? (e.g. Averages say I need to sell 20 cars to reach my income goal, I sold 16 thus a shortfall of 4)
3. How much harder will I have to work/What will I do differently next time to accomplish this goal in the comming month? (e.g. if I continue to work the same way I’ll continue to get 16, if I follow up more often and take a sales course I might be able to get those extra 4—or just stay later and start earlier)
4. What will I do next week to prepare to acheive this goal in the next month?(Add this to next weeks list of things to do…e.g. Contact more prospective car buyers in the last week of this month that may generate some sales next month.)
5. What is a major constraint(or constraints), that I can leverage, that if eliminated would make all the difference? (You will now focus on eliminating this constraint, brainstorm how to do it and then take action … e.g. get out behind the desk and actually go talk to people who are look at vehicles in the lot.)
6. Due to the Lead* measures, are the Lag* measures leading me to think I’m closer/future than I really am to achieving this goal? e.g. Am I too busy checking the score sheet(Lag) when I should be perfecting my skills(Lead)?
7. What did I do right(what’s the winning strategy), that allowed me to get as far as I have? (focus on what you did right and either do more of it or continue it at least … e.g. Gave out a lot of cards which resulted in multiple calls from certain people interested in buying Hondas)
8. What assumptions did I make this month that may have acted as a constraint to this goal? (e.g. I assumed that it was going to be a good month for vehicle sales, ended up I didn’t work hard enough to find prospects and sat back)
9. Is there a lack of emotional desire to this goal, or mabye mixed feelings? Can I adjust this goal to appeal to my emotions better so as to increase motivation? If not, is this a goal that really matters to me? (If you’ve lost interest in this goal, strike it off the list and save your energy for what you really want.)

If you did achieve your the goal this month ask: What is the winning strategy that I can extract from accomplishment and duplicate over the next few months, years, decades, etc?

*A Lead measure is what Kaplan and Norton call a “Performance Driver”, a Lag measure is a “Performance Indicator”. Lead measures can often be referred to as preventative measures or measures(e.g. changing tires on a car). The speedometer can tell you how fast the car is traveling but can’t predict a flat tire, tending to the tires are Lead measures. The Lag measure will tell you your weight(on the scale) but can’t tell you the driving forces of your weight loss.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

“How do you cut through a rock? You either use time or a water-jet-cutter. The problem? For most, the proverbial water jet cutter hasn’t yet been invented.”

As a nation where the word “instant” is commonplace and where we can get results within seconds, we’ve undervalued this thing called consistency. We’re always looking for instant cash, instant breakthroughs and instant improvement. The problem with breakthroughs is that their extremely rare and most people cant live on lucky breaks. Instantaneous change also brings low value. Usually, the faster something is made, the lower its quality. It creates unpredictable and artificial results. It ignores the laws of momentum and the worst part is, it only works once in while.

“Trying to make a single momentous change is often not only successful, but often does not result in the desired effect. In fact, it is far better to make small habitual positive life changes that will catapult you to success. “ – Lighthouse Marketing Blog

Success could be much easier and would come much sooner if we could control our urges to rush things beyond their capacity. A lot of problems can be solved if we’d quit working so hard on having it all now and just learned how to pace ourselves. There are countless day to day routine actions you could take to improve your future. Maybe like working-out daily or finishing one small task on an unfinished project every day.

How many times have you spent entire weeks on a project to the point of complete burn out? It distracts your attention from other projects and other things that need to get done. It ends up feeling like you’re moving backward instead of forward. The climax of this overkill is a day of the week where you’re warding off a million urgent little things, fighting burn out and on top of that there’s regular work to do.

There’s nothing wrong with hard work, and sometimes/often you’ll feel the need to pull an all nighter to meet a deadline or get back up to speed. The point is, an effective work philosophy takes all the important areas of life and moves them ahead on a consistent basis, thus creating momentum. Much of this progress is so small that we tend to underestimate its significance. A lot of people throw in the towel before results have a chance to reveal themselves. However once the snowball grows larger it starts moving faster and starts cutting down and crushing whatever stands in its way. Only once it has come to a complete stop is when it’s hardest to get going again.

The momentum factor is what we miss when we overload ourselves with too much work, or try too hard to move things too fast. We’d all love to get a massive load of work done in a short period of time. Although the reality of it is, it somewhat goes against a few laws of nature. What happens when things grow too fast? Growing pains, other parts have to catch up and it can turn into a mess. After the fact, we expect to eat an entire elephant in one bite.

Jeff Olson explains the Sligh-Edge formula: the philosophy of “constant and never-ending improvement” similar to Dr. Deming’s philosophy. Dr. W. Edwards Deming partly responsible for his influence in reviving the Japanese economy after the second world war:

“Dr. Deming is credited as one of the leaders who brought one of the first quality movements to the Japanese. His basic premise was that the secret to help the Japanese achieve world power and economic success was if every single person and organization commit to constant improvement.” – Tony Robbins CANI System Explained.

It has been said, “you can eat an elephant if you do it one bite at a time.”

“Jeff Olson talks about the Slight-Edge Formula for success. Imagine an incremental system where you consciously plan to improve just ¼% each day, or even each week. Can you do that? Sure you can. Everybody can. It has been said that “you can eat an elephant if you do it one bite at a time.” The same idea holds true with this concept. The premise is to experience minute improvements on a consistent basis that tend to compound over time like interest. A ¼% improvement in any skill each day is a 1-¾% improvement each week! A 7% improvement each month! An 84% improvement in just 1 year! It’s actually higher than that because all of your advances are compounding at an exponential rate! Are you beginning to see the potential of this compounding power at work within you?” – The Slight-Edge Formula

The Slight-Edge formula is easy, but it’s hard if you lack patience. The Slight-Edge formula will work faster than the overload, 20-hour-day-burnout formula. Even a baby can use this simple but dangerously powerful model.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Photo Credit: ACME-Nollmeyer
I can often type with my eyes closed. I guess I’ve been using computers for so long that it just happens without me thinking. As soon as I try to think about where the “R” key is or the “L” key is I all of a sudden I cant do it without messing up. It’s kind of a shitty example but demonstrates a good point when it comes to excellence and building skills. I can do it out of reflex, I don’t know how to do it though. I really don’t need to.

Most of the things you want in life usually has something to do with your day to day habits and disciplines. If you think I’m full of crap hear this:

90% of ALL you behavior is habitual!

So it seems like the answer to your personal excellence is in the habits you create.

“There’s no overnight success involved in excellence! The cost of overnight success is overnight failure—when you find that your success outweighs your capacity.” – Clinton Skakun

How many times have you heard of the guru who went from being broke to being a millionaire sitting on the beach with a bunch of hot blond chicks in red bikinis. Yeah it happened really fast! These stories are often very rare lucky breaks or a misrepresentation of what the person had to do in the first place to get there. They often don’t mention all the shit the person had to go through to get there. How many times did he fail, how long did he practice? Etc etc. It’s true that there are ways to skip a lot of the pain and roadblocks that others experienced by studying other people who have made it to the top. Modeling their mental syntax, physiology and belief systems. It’s NOT true however that success comes easy. The hardest part(I’d have to say for me) is being persistent, and doing the right things on a regular basis.

Persistence is the common factor of almost ALL real successes. Techniques tried ONCE seldom ever work.

I’m sure we can all relate to this. Most people have a very bad habit of doing something for a little while, then complaining it didn’t work. “I already tried that and it didn’t work” WELL no shit Einstein! The price for success is pure sacrifice, you must be willing to do things failures DON’T. Remember, “For every disciplined effort there is a multiple reward.” – Jim Rohn. You need to put your faith in disciplines and character building habits and then have the patience to follow through.

Make Routine Your Slave

If you’re anything like me you probably hate routine with a passion. Your daily routines really have an effect on your ultimate outcome. Think of it, if you could turn 2 hours a day of negative or boring routine into building empowering habits, what could you accomplish in 2-3 months? And if you continued who would you be in 10 or 20 years from now? Do you think changing your habits could have SOME kind of effect on your life within that timespan. I think so. What if you made a habit to have a balanced life, and made sure everything that was important to you got sufficient attention?

Try something every day for 21 days

Most people have their little daily rituals, like making their bed and brushing their teeth and then having breakfast. After years of doing this you don’t have to make an effort any more, it just happens every day and feels unnatural to go against this flow. The behavior eventually becomes a natural part of you. Almost as natural as eating or sleeping. The funny thing is it only takes 21 days to create a new habit. You could spend your whole life trying to become an overnight success and miss this concept completely. So why doesn’t everyone do this? Maybe because it’s too simple or maybe because there’s “not enough time” or something like that.

So what habits could you develop you may ask? Anything that would improve your performance in your day to day life. Something that would stamp out procrastination would be a good example. (e.i. I have something called the 1-day-rule, get it done now!). When we link pain to a task we tend to put it off, it causes us anxiety, the task gets bigger and harder to approach, late penalties occur or we miss the boat and then we have an even BIGGER problem on our hands, until we link more pain to not doing it and force ourselves before it kills us. Or maybe you have the bad habit of getting to meetings late, or slumping all the time(physiology controls your emotions). Or maybe you have a bad habit of not paying yourself first, or going on a spending spree and ending up with nothing to pay bills. Don’t ever fall into using excuses like “it’s the way I am” or “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”. That’s a load of BS. You can change almost anything about yourself if you try hard enough to change it. I understand that some things CAN’T be changed, like mental problems or physical problems or genetic disorders etc etc. But from all the impossibilities, there are more possibilities than impossibilities.

Most habits can be broken and created in around 21 days. For more serious things like smoking or drinking may take months or even years to break. But most habits are very simple. It seems to be the answer to everything you want to become. Tom Hopkins said: “You don’t determine your future, you choose your disciplines and your disciplines determine your future”

Here’s how you change your habits: Practice them EVERY day for the next 21 days. If you slip once, start over. Just keep your mind on that short amount of time, 21 days, 3 weeks. It happens in no time at all and it beats 10 years of suffering because of a habit you cant control.

Here is how you do it:

1. What is the negative habit? (Procrastinating)
   
2. What are the consequences? (Overloaded with problems)
   
3. What is the positive habit you want to develop? (Eliminate problems instantly)
4. What are the future benefits? (A life free of problems that don’t really need to be there)
   
5. What are the 3 things you need to do to change this habit? (1. Take care of the problem the day it arises. 2. Think of the HELL you’ll go through if this problem persists. 3. Plan ahead and anticipate problems, be there to take care of them when they arise and work on prevention)
   

Life’s too short to be controlled by behaviors that work against you every day. Think of what you can do once you get over, for example, public speaking, or teaching people, or a fear of heights etc etc. What if you worked on changing 4 habits a month, in 10 years that would be 480 new habits. Would that make a profound difference?

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

photo credit: outsidecontext
We hear the word failure all the time. There are different definitions of failure and what it really means. This is my definition of failure: when you give up. Don’t think it gets any simpler or needs to be any more complicated than that.

There seems to be two ideas of what failure is:

90% of people think failure is a setback or a defeat.

If they don’t win the lottery they failed. Or if they don’t pass test they’ve failed. The 90% lacks commitment and don’t want a challenge.

10% of people view setback and defeat as a perfect chance to learn. Defeat and failure to the 90% is valuable feedback to the 10%.

To them failure is:

• Failing to live life to its fullest.
• Never creating results, never living up to their purpose or even finding out of what their purpose is.
• Giving up because of self-limiting beliefs.

AND then there are those people who keep bashing their heads against the wall expecting a different result. These are often the people who try the same thing over and over looking for their lucky break. This can be more damaging than and just as blindsided as doing absolutely nothing and expecting results.

Think of what a shallow world we would live in if there was no feedback for our actions. If all success was was following a secret formula we’d all be rich and famous.

The thing with success is that it’s not a secret formula or a 5 point pop-tart recipe that you can just stick in the microwave. There’s no ONE key to success and there’s ignorant approach you can take either. You can’t be ignorant to important principles and facts and still be successful. The reason why I see people at the bottom of the food chain is because:

1. They’re smart in the wrong areas.
2. They set small goals every new year and usually forget about them.
3. They work extremely hard in the wrong direction and at the wrong job, but want to work very little when given the chance to move in the right direction.
4. Their perception is very mixed up in terms of what’s valuable and what’s not. They make snap judgments.
5. They limit themselves by fear of “failure” and make minded excuses.
6. They waste time and money for short term gain and leave the long term up to credit and their “job security”.

I think #1 is extremely important. People often don’t know what they don’t know and this is why they’re ignorant in all of these other areas as well.

REMEMBER a result or feedback(a.k.a failure) means the following:

• You succeeded in creating a result!
• You now have to change your approach OR
• you have to change your perception.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

photo credit: Hankins

You’ve heard people say it, “experience is the best teacher, book learning is all crock”

or something similar. I have to disagree! No amount of book learning can replace skill or practice. However it’s pretty hard to make a mistake after you read about it in a book. But of course it takes experience to correct that mistake or to improve a skill. You can read everything about flying an airplane, but if you’ve never flew a plane you don’t have the skill and precision of an experienced pilot who knows how to land a place safely, despite what the textbook says. So what do you do? You learn from an experienced pilot who knows how to fly a plane and can give you step by step instructions on how to apply your knowledge.

The BIG problem with experience or trial and error is that it takes a lot of time, money and disappointments. I basically learned web development in a few years by trial and error. But trial and error only got me so far. It wasn’t until I met some experienced web designers that I learned the REAL way to code. I can look back and think of how unskilled I’d be now days if I would have continued with my trial and error method, it would have taken me another 10 years just to get to where I am now.

Skills:

You need to try a lot of techniques, get lots of feedback and spend lots of time hoping a praying that someday all this shit will pay off. Bits and peaces of information will fly by you, you’ll absorb some, forget lots and then find out that some of what you forgot was actually necessary. After years and years(or months and months, depending on the depth of the skill you need) you might still be struggling, trying to find the right syntax to make it work. You might eventually get frustrated and give up.

Have you ever stopped to think why successful people are successful? And why you do the same things that they do but still haven’t quite got there? You’d commonly think to yourself, “well they have better ideas than I do” The Third Man movies or “they’ve had so much more experience”.

Here’s a scary thought: You might be very old before you have accomplished something in the business world. And even then you might be only limited to small successes, slightly above average earnings and you still might not have the work/life balance you always hoped for.

Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to discourage you from pursuing a business. As an entrepreneur I feel your pain! Not in terms of money, but in the amount of time and sleep I’ve given up to pour efforts into things that I thought would make a difference but never seemed to. I’d lie to myself and say that it would all even out some how in the end, but the end never comes because of specific steps have been missed, causing me to go back to the beginning. And then one day it hit me…

Find a mentor who can look at your situation and tell you what you’re not seeing:

A mentor can be a worst enemy or a best friend, depending on your mentality. Often they will push you to do things that you think you can’t do yourself, but they understand that to change your results you need to change what you’re doing. Even if it hurts a bit. A mentor will not only tell you what you have to do but also tell you in what order you have to do them.

Success has a syntax.

• The Hurt Locker movie

It’s not enough to just do the right things, but it’s important to know in what order you do them. If you take the words “David killed the Giant” and rearrange the syntax “the Giant killed David”, you get a different meaning right? What if you rearrange the words to “Killed the Giant David”, same words but it now makes no sense…

See you could be doing all the right things and still get a totally different results. A mentor can tell you WHAT you need to do and in which ORDER to do them.

I believe in doing things in the most effective way possible. You could spend years and years trying the combination until you finally open the safe. Successful people know not only what do to but also in what combination to do them. For example, if a combination for a safe is 6787, using the same numbers  but in a different order 8677 will not get you in the safe. Makes sense?

Why reinvent the wheel when there’s so many examples of success around us every day? They say success leaves clues. Why not become successful right now if right now is the time?

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

X-Men: The Last Stand dvdrip

Aladdin and the King of Thieves psp
Malcom Gladwell, #1 bestseller of Outliers, Tipping Point and Blink

• Toy Soldiers download

Lewis Terman was a professor of psychology at the Standford University after the First World War. He specialized in IQ testing and one day stumbled across a seven year old child who had an IQ of 140(the average IQ of a human is 100-120, Einstein had an IQ of around 150). This child could play the piano and had musical skills far beyond his years. After discovering this talented child, Terman became obsessed with the possibility of there being other such kids with high intelligence. In the years to come he found 1,470 children, out of thousands, who scored an average of 140 to 200 on the IQ test. As these children grew up he studied their grades in high school and beyond, and was delighted at what he saw. Terman viewed these “gifted” children as the future elite of America. The ones who were going to come out on top in areas of science, education, government etc. etc. Terman viewed IQ as the most important factor to a person’s well being, “There is nothing about an individual that is as important as his IQ, except possibly his morals.” he said.

To this day IQ is still viewed as a major factor in determining an individual’s success, whether it be in education or on the job.

Opportunity Thinking vs. Intellectual Thinking

Years later, Termin continued to track the progress his “geniuses” and how they were doing throughout their adult lives. Some became lawyers, authors, judges and a few of them ran for public office. Many of them made an average wage, not the type of wage you’d expect “geniuses” make. A few of them where big time failures.

How do you explain individuals with IQs scoring higher than Einstein’s growing up to be barely above average or less? It becomes apparent that their great intellectual mind power and their ability to identify opportunity are not at all related. So what if they could solve complex math problems? There seems to be a wide gap between what’s required to survive in real life and what they were actually capable of.

I think we put way too much emphasis on IQ. After all, who has a greater advantage, the person who can write the song or the person who can play the song. Both are important, a musician doesn’t get too far just writing songs and not being able to play. However, even a computer can play back music, but it takes a different kind of intelligence to actually WRITE the song.

In Outliers Malcom Gladwell, author of two #1 bestsellers, compares IQ to a basketball player’s hight. Hight is important, but it’s not what ultimately determines a great basketball player. Obviously speed, agility, the ability to pass the ball and score goals matters as well. Just as hight alone doesn’t determine ability to play basketball, IQ doesn’t determine emotional competence and overall smarts required in order to succeed in life. In a lifetime a person must also learn to think creatively, to handle people, negotiate and close deals, think strategically, handle stressful situations etc etc. People who fail soft skills often miss lots of opportunities in their lifetime. Does an IQ test test a level of creativity, or passion, or enthusiasm? Of course not. These are factors that are apart of success but have absolutely nothing to do with IQ.

“Smart” people can calculate the risk factors of a great idea and decide it’s too risky to bother with, yet an enthusiastic, passionate, less educated person can run with and grow something out of an idea that would of otherwise never seen the light of day. This doesn’t happen all the time, but it does often enough. The best escape convicts in the world can find ingenious loop wholes in a jail system to take advantage of. The best marketer in the world knows how to make people go crazy over what he’s marketing. They could both be considered great minds, are they using the same intelligences? Not entirely, . And so my opinion is: focus LESS on IQ and focus MORE on developing your other intelligences, such as EQ(Emotional Intelligence) and your creative abilities. Soft skills wont get you high marks in school, but they will in life. If we want to know about a person’s chances to go places, we need to know much more than his grades in physics and math. IQ, after all, is only just a number, only a very a small slice between one ear and another.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh