A longer time horizon allows you to take in your stride the lead times that inevitably pass before you can make a mark, and to put obstacles into context. You are not thrown off track as much as someone with a short-term view, and instead of a wish, your success takes on an air of relaxed inevitability. Yet the long view takes courage. People with a long-time horizon tend to be more confident because they feel in control of their destiny. As Fritjof Capra noted in The Tao of Physics: ‘The Chinese believe that whenever a situation develops to its extreme, it is bound to turn around and become its opposite. This basic belief has given them courage and perseverance in times of distress and has made them cautious and modest in times of success. The great art critic and aesthete John Ruskin counselled: ‘Never depend upon your genius. If you have talent, industry will improve it; if you have none, industry will supply the deficiency.’ Voltaire, who liked to prick the balloon of privilege and rank, remarked that there was a very fine line that separates the person of ‘genius’ from the ordinary man. ‘Work’, he said, ‘banishes those three great evils: boredom, vice and poverty.’ Buffon, the 19th-century naturalist, simply said: ‘Genius is patience.’ As Ellison said to Wilson: ‘I don’t know of any place or time where there aren’t great possibilities.’ Exactly. You miss one revolution, another one happens. It is never enough to be excellent or even extraordinary in terms of talents, technical skills or ability to motivate and command people. For a person to reach his or her potential, there must be a certain amount of self-reflection and willingness to correct character flaws or rackets. Self-reflection may not be compatible with the go-getting nature of fast success, but it is compatible with real, slow-cooked success. Think Long: Why It's Never Too Late To Be Great
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Don’t be afraid to let go of your old priorities Most people have been guided by the same core priorities for years. They are so attached to their current priorities that to change even one of them would be like cutting off a body part. Some people identify so strongly with their current priorities, they knowingly sacrifice their biggest goals to avoid dealing with the temporary pain of change. A few years ago, I went through the process of determining the top six core priorities that were guiding my life. After a lot of self-reflection, which included digging into the strengths I valued in myself and in others, Putting my priorities down on paper was not easy. In fact, it was painful. I didn’t like some of the items on my list and I was embarrassed by others. But I was determined to be completely honest with myself. I cannot begin to describe the level of clarity and insight I achieved by making this list. Suddenly, I was able to see why I did the things that I did. I finally understood the drivers behind the decisions and actions that shaped my life. You are in control of your priorities—you can erase old priorities and define new priorities at will. My long-held priorities were what got me to my current position, but they were not going to get me to my future position. The first and most important priority that I added to my new list was presence. Without presence of mind, self-awareness, and being able to be present in the moment, I would not be able to enjoy any of my pursuits. I would also not be able to see all of the opportunities around me. Second, I added both openness and relationships to my list. If I wanted to be an effective author, I would have to learn to be uncomfortably vulnerable, transparent, and authentic. This openness would help me connect with other people, including my audience, fans, and readers. By valuing relationships, I would stay focused on building lasting connections that would add meaning to my life and the lives of others. Then I added contribution to the list, which would help me redefine success and achievement. With contribution as one of my core priorities, I would stop asking, “How can I get ahead?” and start asking, “How can I add value?” Focusing on contribution would help me stay focused on building, creating, giving, and leaving a legacy. Lastly, I added strategy to my list. Strategy meant staying focused on my long-term goal. I would be a strategist consumed with purpose rather than a tactician consumed with instant gratification. Valuing foresight in this way would prevent me from wasting my time. It would also encourage me to be more intelligent, patient, and wise. Most importantly, I would stop engaging in battles that did not matter. While many of my priorities changed, vitality stayed exactly the same. I firmly believe that vitality should be near the top of everyone’s list. Your new purpose may be important, but it’s useless if you are unhealthy, sick, or dead. Of course, you can leave a legacy from the grave, but while you’re here on Earth, the healthier you are, the more effective you are. You never lose your strengths. Finding and fulfilling your purpose requires you to define your core priorities and develop new ones. There is no loss; you are merely adding to your repertoire. You are in control of your priorities—you can erase old priorities and define new priorities at will. The key is to define your new priorities with words that inspire you. Choose words that fill you with hope and energy, and drastically impact your decisions and actions. In this way, you will align your current life with your new purpose and guard yourself against distracting activities and emotions. Black Hole Focus: How Intelligent People Can Create a Powerful Purpose for Their Lives “Accept everything about yourself—I mean everything. You are you and that is the beginning and the end—no apologies, no regrets.” Henry A. Kissinger The only way to get to where you want to go is to ruthlessly evaluate where you are now. The key here is that your biggest obstacle in life is always yourself—not external factors. Define where you are and what you have, without prejudice, and you will be ready to fulfill your purpose in life, and seeing your current position clearly is the first step to moving forward and making your life better. The only way to define your current reality is to completely erase the past and disregard the pull of emotions from your mind. Every decision that you make during the day is colored by your past experiences and your emotions. Usually, this is a good thing, because it keeps you from repeating the same mistakes. However, in order to define where you are right now, in this exact moment, you must forget the past and treat your emotions as a disease. Any feelings—especially those of fear, anger, sadness, or guilt—will prevent you from objectively measuring your current station in life. Once your mind is totally clear and in the present, imagine you were dropped from the sky into your current life as it stands right now. See your life from the viewpoint of an astronaut returning to the Earth after hundreds of years in outer space. How would a complete stranger describe your life right now, with no knowledge of past successes and failures, and no knowledge of your emotions and desires? Carefully measure your assets and liabilities, your strengths and your limitations, as well as those of your connections. Complete this exercise from both a personal and a professional perspective. For example, if you are an award-winning chef, make a note of the cooking skills you have, as well as those you lack. However, ignore your past awards because they are of no use to you in the present. Where is there opportunity for personal and professional growth in your life right now, in this moment, with no regard to your past? Keep your emotions turned off but let your past come into play. What have you accomplished? What have you failed to accomplish? Ignore excuses or rationalizations that come into your head. Ignore your emotions and any attempts that your mind makes to justify what you are in the process of accomplishing. Refuse to evade reality by pretending things are one way when they are really another. Only then will you be able to see where you stand and how far you are from achieving your goal. Take careful notice of your victories and your defeats. Are there any patterns? What have you been particularly successful at? Do your failures have anything in common? Now that you know where you stand, embrace it. Realize that only you are responsible for both the good and bad in your life. It is your own bad strategies—not God, the universe, or the unfair opponent—that are to blame for your failures. This mindset will free you from excuses and open your mind to the numerous possibilities existing in your life. Instead of getting defensive about past mistakes and failures, learn from them and search out new opportunities to face and similar challenges to surmount. Once you do this, you will start creating your own second chances. Black Hole Focus: How Intelligent People Can Create a Powerful Purpose for Their Lives 3 magic questions for identifying desires The following 3 questions are my favorites because they are extremely effective for generating ideas for your life desires list. 1. How would you live your life if you had a billion dollars? People often limit their desires by thinking about their current salary, savings or job. Thinking about this question will allow you to identify what you would do, have or be if money wasn’t a problem. To live the life of your dreams, you first need to understand how the life of your dreams looks. Once you identify clearly what you really dream about, you will be able to develop a plan for fulfilling a dream no matter what your current circumstances are. 2. If you were guaranteed success, what would you do? People often limit their desires by thinking about potential failures and obstacles. This question will allow you to decide which desires would make your life more fulfilling if you were guaranteed success. The answers to this question are certainly great candidates for your 100 dreams list and once fulfilled will make your life an exciting adventure. 3. Remember all the moments in your life when you felt alive, excited and happy. How could you bring more such moments to your life? You have experienced a lot of happy moments in the past that psychologist Abraham Maslow has identified as “peak experiences.” One of your aims in life is to enjoy as many happy moments as possible. If you clearly understand what caused these happy moments in the past, you will have ideas for desires that need to be added to your dreams list in order to experience more of these peak experiences in the future. The Achievement Factory: How to Fulfill Your Dreams and Make Life an Adventure “What recommendation can you give to a person who wants to make his or her life more exciting?”11/2/2014 “What recommendation can you give to a person who wants to make his or her life more exciting?” First, live your life as an adventure story. You are both a writer and a main character of the book describing the story of your life, and if the plot is interesting you will be excited to wake up every morning and take part in adventures. Secondly, live your life as a competition. Raise your standards and aim for continual progress in important areas of your life. No matter in which area of life you want to become better, today you compete with yesterday’s you and tomorrow you will compete with today’s you. Finally, live your life as an exploration. Explore the world by doing what you have never done before, by visiting places you have never been to before, by meeting people you haven’t known before. The biggest breakthroughs in life happen when you expand your comfort zone and explore the world beyond the border of what you are familiar with. Often people are afraid of going outside of their comfort zone, however in 99% of cases what they fear isn’t dangerous at all. Ask yourself: “What do I fear to do, but will bring me joy if I do it?” Live your life as an exploration, expand your comfort zone, experiment and you will have an exciting life. Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. – George Bernard Shaw The only thing you can control is your actions. No matter how bad the circumstances are it is always possible to get what you want; however, to get it you need to believe in the statement: “I am 100% responsible for everything that happens in my life. My actions, not the circumstances, create my future.” The biggest reason why people fail is not their lack of abilities but their lack of belief in their abilities. No matter what you believe in, your brain will look for confirmations that you are right and will eventually find them. As Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.” The magical invocation that successful people use to achieve their goals is “I can.” On the way to your goal tell yourself “I can” every day, and if anybody ever says “You can’t” say “I can.” You can achieve literally whatever you want if you have a big enough desire and belief that you can. There is a significant difference between, “I wish to achieve my goal” and “I am committed to achieve my goal.” If you wish to achieve your goal it means, “I will accept it if it falls into my lap.” You will do what is easy and convenient on the way to the goal, but once faced with difficulties you will find excuses and give up. However, if you decide to be committed, it means, “I will achieve my goal no matter what. Failure is not an option.” Commitment is when you have burned the ships and there is no room for a backup in your mind. Having a plan B is dangerous, because if you have it you won’t do 100% of what you can to implement your plan A. The secret of incredible commitment is simple: “Determine which dream could have the biggest positive impact on your happiness. Make a promise to yourself to fulfill this dream no matter how difficult it is.” 100 dreams exercise Write down all your dreams Your task is to write down a minimum of 100 desires that you would ask a genie to fulfill if you had a magic lamp. This could be literally anything: small desires, big desires, physical possessions, relationships, achievements or experiences. Imagine what your perfect life would look like and think about which desires would bring you from where you are to the life in your imagination. Spend at least 1 hour thinking about what you would want if there were no limitations and you could get and achieve anything. Don’t worry about making this list perfect, as you will be able to change or update it in the future. The most important thing in this exercise is the quantity of desires, which should be not less than 100. You will probably write the first 20 desires really quickly because they are at the top of your mind. Once you exhaust desires you have thought about before, your subconscious will begin really thinking. Desires that are between numbers 60 and 100 are usually the most original desires that you haven’t considered before. According to research done by Dominican University, people who just think about their goals achieve them with 43% probability. People who not only think about their goals but also write down their goals achieve them with 61% probability. Finally, people who write down their goals, create action plans and check progress weekly increase their chances for success to 76%. Isn’t that impressive that just by thinking about what you want you can achieve your goal with 43% probability and writing down your goal increases this probability by another 20%? The Achievement Factory: How to Fulfill Your Dreams and Make Life an Adventure Build a Business With Growth in its DNA 1. Profit Margin It’s easy to work out whether or not your business has profit margin, or to at least estimate it early on. Imagine not being involved in your business at all—everything the customer experiences gets handled by a team of people or systems. How much does it cost you to keep that customer and how much revenue do they generate? The actual, acceptable percentage will depend on a lot of things, but obviously you have to be making more than it’s costing you to service each customer. For our services startup I decided a reasonable figure was double. That is: half of our revenue is costs, half is profit, so I’d have a 50% margin. If it costs $50 / month to service a customer, I would price the service at $100. I solved this problem by cutting out 99% of what I offered and only offering a service that I knew affordable contractors could excel at it. This enabled me to have an acceptable margin in the business of around 50%. 2. Large Market I’m not into niches. I want to make sure whatever I start could be a $1,000,000 business in a few years, ideally more. I hope you are the same. If you want something that grows, it has to have something to grow into, and the last thing you want is to kill your momentum by hitting a ceiling. I’ve mentioned serving a large market previously, but since it’s such a big growth inhibitor, it bears repeating here. 3. Asset Building When I sold my business, I learned that project clients were worth very little. The website and the recurring clients were transferable assets. The historical revenue from project work wasn’t worth much at all. 4. Simple Business Model Having a simple product and a simple value proposition makes everything else easier. From elevator pitches to growth tracking to hiring—the more complex a model, the harder it is to know when things are going well. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. 5. Recurring or Predictable Revenue Having a simple MRR model makes everything easier. There are other benefits like predictable revenue, simple metrics, simple goals, easy-to-see growth/growth sources, easy resourcing/scaling, and constant sources of motivation. A year in and I am still manually updating the MRR on a daily basis and giving my team members virtual high-fives. The 7 Day Startup: You Don't Learn Until You Launch Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. The basics of starting a business are very simple; you don’t need an MBA (keep the $60,000 tuition), venture capital, or even a detailed plan. You just need a product or service, a group of people willing to pay for it, and a way to get paid. This can be broken down as follows: 1. Product or service: what you sell 2. People willing to pay for it: your customers 3. A way to get paid: how you’ll exchange a product or service for money To make this clear let's say it again; To start a business, you need three things: a product or service, a group of people willing to pay for it, and a way to get paid. Everything else The hard way to start a business is to fumble along, uncertain whether your big idea will resonate with customers. The easy way is to find out what people want and then find a way to give it to them. the problem: Many businesses are modeled on the idea that customers should come back to the kitchen and make their own dinner. Instead of giving people what they really want, the business owners have the idea that it’s better to involve customers behind the scenes … because that’s what they think customers want. As you begin to think like an entrepreneur, you’ll notice that business ideas can come from anywhere. When you go to the store, pay attention to the way they display the signage. Check the prices on restaurant menus not just for your own budget but also to compare them with the prices at other places. When you see an ad, ask yourself: What is the most important message the company is trying to communicate? The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. As you begin to think like an entrepreneur, you’ll notice that business ideas can come from anywhere. When you go to the store, pay attention to the way they display the signage. Check the prices on restaurant menus not just for your own budget but also to compare them with the prices at other places. When you see an ad, ask yourself: What is the most important message the company is trying to communicate? When thinking about different business ideas, also think about money. Get in the habit of equating “money stuff” with ideas. When brainstorming and evaluating different projects, money isn’t the sole consideration—but it’s an important one. Ask three questions for every idea: a. How would I get paid with this idea? b. How much would I get paid from this idea? c. Is there a way I could get paid more than once? If you have an existing business and are thinking about how to apply the concepts from this book, focus on either getting money in the bank or developing new products or services. These are the most important tasks of your business—not administration, maintenance, or anything else that takes time without creating wealth or value. Friedrich Engels said: “An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory. The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future. The point of launching a business quickly is that you can get real data from real customers. This will help you determine if the business is having an impact. But how do you know what a good result is? In examples where companies really take off, you don’t need to worry about this step. Companies like Buffer and Dropbox never had to worry about whether or not they were onto something; thousands of people were signing up. It was obvious! Similarly, when companies are an outright flop, that tends to be obvious as well. They are the one-percenters. Most companies fall in the middle, so it’s important to have some sort of framework around whether or not your business is going well. The way I like to think about this is to focus on the One Metric That Matters (OMTM) at different stages in your business.52 When you launch, it makes sense to focus on the number of people who sign up and pay you. Set a reasonable target that takes into consideration your reach and your marketing efforts and price point. With any business I’ve started, my primary goal has been to get to a point where I’m paying myself a reasonable wage as early as possible. The figure I’ve always used is $40,000 per year. If I can get to the point where I’m paying myself a wage of $40,000, I know I have enough there to keep the business going. Eventually I have the faith that I’ll continue to improve this number. Here are some general principles around setting your OMTM target: Make it a financial metric, not a vanity metric like website visits or Facebook likes. Pay particular attention to who is signing up. If it’s just your friends, then that’s very different from the general public. Set a goal for the first month and re-visit it each month after that. My team uses a live Google doc for tracking financials. It requires manual updating, but it’s great for motivation and it allows you to have live estimates instead of relying on old data in accounting systems. There’s a free template at wpcurve.com/7daystartup. Don’t measure something that no longer represents an important metric for your business. The OMTM will change over time. The 7 Day Startup: You Don't Learn Until You Launch Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. Once you know your assumptions, devise specific tests to validate them as cheaply as possible.10/11/2014 Once you know your assumptions, devise specific tests to validate them as cheaply as possible. These first tests in a channel are often very cheap: for instance, if you spend just $250 on AdWords, you’ll get a rough idea of how well the search engine marketing channel works for your business. With limited resources, it’s almost impossible to optimize multiple strategies at once. Running ten social ads and testing everything about them (ad copy, landing pages, etc.) is a full-time endeavor. That is optimization, not testing. Rather, you should be running several cheap tests (perhaps two social ads with two landing pages) that give some indication of how successful a given channel or channel strategy could be. “The faster you run high quality experiments, the more likely you’ll find scalable, effective growth tactics. Determining the success of a customer acquisition idea is dependent on an effective tracking and reporting system, so don’t start testing until your tracking/reporting system has been implemented.” Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. |
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