The 10X Rule is about pure domination mentality. You never do what others do. You must be willing to do what they won't do—and even take actions that you might deem “unreasonable.”
Any goal you set is going to be difficult to achieve, and you will inevitably be disappointed at some points along the way. So why not set these goals much higher than you deem worthy from the beginning? If they are going to require work, effort, energy, and persistence, then why not exert 10 times as much of each? What if you are underestimating your capabilities? Remember: A person who limits his or her potential success will limit what he or she will do to create it and keep it. As long as you are alive, you will either live to accomplish your own goals and dreams or be used as a resource to accomplish someone else's. When you have underestimated the time, energy, and effort necessary to do something, you will have “quit” in your mind, voice, posture, face, and presentation. You won't develop the persistence necessary to get your mission accomplished. However, when you correctly estimate the effort necessary, you will assume the appropriate posture. The marketplace will sense by your actions that you are a force to be reckoned with and are not going away—and it will begin to respond accordingly. Never reduce a target. Instead, increase actions. When you start rethinking your targets, making up excuses, and letting yourself off the hook, you are giving up on your dreams! The 10X Rule assumes the target is never the problem. Any target attacked with the right actions in the right amounts with persistence is attainable. I know you've probably heard this before, but success does not merely “happen.” It is the result of relentless, proper actions taken over time. Only those who operate with the appropriate view and corresponding actions will have success. Luck clearly has something to do with it, but anyone who is “getting lucky” will tell you that their “luck” is directly proportional to what they've done. The more actions you take, the better your chances are of getting “lucky.” The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure Increasing Your Income There are many ways to increase your income. I cover the 3 that worked best.3/9/2014
Increasing Your Income There are many ways to increase your income. I cover the three that worked best for us.
1. Selling things. You probably have a lot of stuff you didn’t even realize you had. I admitted that I had more stuff than I thought and when I actually let go I decided to get rid of things. We sold everything we could, from furniture that wasn’t necessary, to old computer monitors, to our kayak. When you can start to let go of the excess stuff you own, you can start to feel better. You feel more organized, and you feel like you are in control of things. As you downsize, it’s important to show appreciation for what you do have. There are so many people with much less, even if you are living paycheck to paycheck. Taking old things and donating them to Goodwill or friends in need may not help your budget, but it will help your mind. Giving during a time of scarcity is a great experience. 2. Increase your wage at your current job. I know the economy isn’t great, but if you are providing a lot of value to your employer, it doesn’t hurt to ask for a raise. I remember I was only three months into working at my company, and even though I was making more money than I ever imagined possible before, I asked for a raise. I even asked for a big raise. I’m not usually someone who enjoys risk, so it seemed a bit out of character for me. However, when I looked at the risk logically, I realized the worst they could do was say no. They had loved me as an employee so far. In fact, they hired one of my friends from college based on my recommendation. If they said no, then they would at least see my eagerness to improve. Although I was very nervous when the words came out of my mouth, just a few short days later, they said yes. If you want to ask for a raise, here are a few tips: Make sure you are going above and beyond your current job description already. Employers love to see eager workers and know that they have people they can count on. They don’t want to lose people who are willing to go above and beyond. Make sure there is no ultimatum implied. When asking for a raise, it may sound like you aren’t happy with your current salary or that you are unhappy with your job. To keep things peaceful, make sure you validate that you appreciate your current situation, too. You can alienate your boss or company if they think you dislike the work and just want more money to justify it. Go in prepared and use numbers. Make sure you go in knowing what you are asking for. Don’t just say, “I want a raise.” Your employer needs to know how much you are looking for. Use numbers to show how much value you are delivering. If your job has any direct relation to creating gross revenue, make sure you explain how much you are bringing in. If you have had a direct impact and have created happier customers or fewer problems with software, and so on, make sure you back up your claim with numbers. You want to make it a no-brainer for your employer to give you a raise, even if they don’t have the funds to pay you now. This will give you a good chance to show how valuable you are. If you don’t feel like you have anything to show them to justify a raise, then go create more impact in your company before you ask for one. If you can’t show your value to an employer, then don’t ask for a raise. If your company is holding you back so you can’t show your value, then ask them for more responsibilities! 3. Starting a business. If your goal is to start a business, start it now as a side hustle. The next few chapters go over finding a solid idea and how millionaires started their businesses. Ahead, you’ll also find help with goal setting and creating a three-month action plan. You want the side hustle to start now so you can start to learn a lot about business while you have the security of your job. It also allows for more income so you can pay off your debt faster. That way you can set yourself up financially to quit your day job. The Eventual Millionaire: How Anyone Can Be an Entrepreneur and Successfully Grow Their Startup Eight Steps to Efficient Time Management
Keep a daily work diary. Write down every task that you handle. At the end of each week, assign a value to each task indicating which tasks can be delegated or outsourced. When making this type of decision, think about what your time is worth. For example, is your time better spent focusing on marketing or filing paperwork? Time Management Tips Keep your working space organized. File papers promptly, or set a time to file papers all at once. Don’t let that paperwork pile up. Get into the filing habit now, while your company is still small. This will also set a good example for your employees to follow. Return emails and calls promptly, ideally within twenty-four hours. Set a time to do this but not first thing in the morning. I found that when I would answer calls first thing, I would get distracted by what other people wanted or needed me to do and my to-do list would get pushed back or put off. The best time to answer the phone or reply to emails is after you got your priority items done or started as sometimes you’re also waiting on others input. Focus on accomplishing things. In other words, focus on productivity. Getting Started Checklist
Ecom Hell: How to Make Money in Ecommerce Without Getting Burned What do people struggle with the most when it comes to connecting with others and building a network?
Asking. Nobody ever wants to ask—at every level, with every kind of person, from the CEO all the way down. I think people get very narrow-minded, thinking that they can only reach out to people who are already doing a similar type of job. But the underlying network science says that it’s all about weak links. Those people who are the friend of a friend of a friend. That’s a much more likely place for something important to happen to you than your inner circle of close friends and colleagues. If you don’t ask, you’ll never get. Sure, you may only get a little bit at a time. But if you don’t ask, 100 percent of the time you won’t get. You’ve just got to get over yourself. We live in a connection economy. If you can’t connect with people for them to understand what you have to offer, you’re working in a vacuum and you’re going to lose out. You end up getting bitter in that situation, because you see your peers are moving up and doing things, and you say, “I could be doing those things. Why not me?” It’s very easy to think that somebody knows you. And that if they know you, they will think about calling you, or asking you, or wanting you for something. But people forget. I was a headhunter for many years, and I was always amazed because easily 20 percent of the time, the final person who was hired was well-known to the client. (They just hadn’t thought about them.) That means that, for every five people you know, one is likely to have an impact on you or hire you—that should make you want to expand your circle. Building a network is like cultivating a botanical garden: You don’t want everyone in your network to be one color or one species. You want a variety of ages and stages and professions and passions, and to tend them carefully. Look at the people whom you admire most in your field. And literally map it out. Here are the four people that are doing great work at the organizations I respect. And just reach out. If you decided to contact one person a week, that would be fifty-two new people in a year. And it starts with that, just reaching out to someone because you admire their work, or are inspired by it. I’ve never met a person, no matter how well-known, who hasn’t been flattered by an authentic compliment. Professional love letters work. Maximize Your Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks & Build an Incredible Career (The 99U Book Series) Your best chance of bouncing back, sorting it out, and getting things rocking again lies in the practice of social contracting, a discipline that management thinker Peter Block introduced in his terrific book Flawless Consulting.
But to make it easier, here are five fundamental questions to ask and answer. You don’t need to ask them all. I’m sure you’ll find your own best combination for the person and the situation. Just make sure you ask some of them before things get rolling. You’ll want to remember that any good contract is a mutual exchange. So don’t be fooled into thinking that your job is just to ask the questions. You need to be willing to answer them as well, so you and your collaborator both know where you each might stumble. What do you want? (Here’s what I want.) This is a question that almost always stops people in their tracks. It’s deceptively difficult to answer and incredibly powerful when you can define clearly what exactly it is you want from this relationship. Of course you’ll want to articulate the transactional nature of things: I want you to get this done and get that completed. But see if you can go beyond that. What else do you want? (“I want this to position me for my next promotion.”) What else would make this relationship one to truly value? (“I want this to lay the foundations of future work together. Where might you need help? (Here’s where I’ll need help.) This turns the “What do you want?” question over and comes at it from a different angle. You might want to specify where you’ll trip yourself up (bold), how you might fall short in the relationship (bolder), or even how you might get in the way (boldest). When you had a really good working relationship in the past, what happened? (Here’s what happened for me.) Tell a story of a time when you were in a working relationship similar to this one, and it was good, really good. What did they do? What did you do? What else happened? What were the key moments when the path divided and you took one road and not the other? What else contributed to its success? When things go wrong, what does that look like on your end? How do you behave? (Here’s how I behave.) Tell another story, this time of when a working relationship like this one failed to soar. It might be when it all went hellishly wrong or it might be when it disintegrated into mediocrity. What did you do and what did they do? Where were the missed opportunities? Where were the moments when things got broken? When things go wrong—as they inevitably will—how shall we manage that? The power in this is twofold. First, you’re acknowledging reality: Things will go wrong. Honeymoons end. Promises get broken. Expectations don’t get met. By putting that on the table, you’re able now to discuss what the plan will be when it does go wrong. I’ve done everything from creating a code phrase (“I need to have an ‘off my chest’ conversation with you…”) to inventing a process (“I’m hitting the Mission Pause button”), to simply agreeing that we have permission to talk about things when we feel we must. Maximize Your Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks & Build an Incredible Career (The 99U Book Series) You can hear awesome if you put your ear against the door. You know awesome is just on the other side. But the great misconception is that you need a key to open the door. You don’t. The door is unlocked. You just need to turn the knob and walk through it. That’s the first secret about purpose. The door has been open the whole time. Push the door open and take the next step into awesome. The second secret about purpose is that it usually finds you. Purpose is attracted to motion. Purpose is attracted to momentum. Purpose loves to surprise you mid-stride. Very rarely will it greet you on your front doorstep. More often than not, you’ll encounter purpose in the middle of the road when you least expect it. So start. The door has always been open. But I must warn you. The moment you decide, “I’m going to live with purpose today instead of trying to find my purpose someday,” you’ll be tempted to look for shortcuts. Now that you are free to start down the path of Learning, you may want to turn that freedom into a license to jump ahead. Don’t. It never works out.
I’ve never met a farmer who was surprised by his crops. Who stood on a front porch, in overalls I’m assuming, and stared out at a crop of blood oranges when he clearly remembered planting soybeans. If you work hard, you tend to expect results. If you decide that you’ll spend ten hours a week on your path to expertise instead of twenty, you’ll get there slower than someone who owns the twenty and gets down to business. Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work that Matters Understand that you can only take action in the present moment, and you can only enjoy your results in the present as well. You can’t accomplish or experience anything in the past or future because you’re never there. When people learn about goal setting, they often set goals in violation of this fact. It’s difficult to achieve something that’s based on an inaccurate model of reality—such a goal will surely be an uphill struggle. The purpose of goal setting isn’t to control the future.
The point of goal setting is to improve the quality of your present-moment reality. Setting goals can give you greater clarity and focus right now. When you set a goal that improves your present reality, what does it matter how long it takes to achieve the final outcome? Whether it takes one week or five years is irrelevant. The whole path is fun and enjoyable. Whenever you set goals, you can envision a path of sacrifice and suffering by focusing on the illusion of the future, or you can allow the goal to inject your present reality with excitement, enthusiasm, and motivation. Even though it seems like you’re setting goals for the future, you’re really doing so for the present. The better you understand this, the more easily you’ll achieve what you set out to do. If you adopt this mind-set, you’ll soon learn to set different kinds of goals. If your goals look great on paper but don’t fill you with desire and motivation when you focus on them, they’re worthless. Don’t settle for wimpy goals you aren’t passionate about. Effort If you want to turn your desires into reality, at some point you must take action. When you set goals that truly inspire you, you’ll feel naturally motivated to take action. You’ll work hard, but it won’t seem like hard work because you’ll be so inspired. For the most part, you’ll just be doing what you love to do. When you focus single-mindedly on what you want, you’ll begin to notice new resources appearing in your life. If you don’t take action, however, those resources will dry up, and you’ll be no closer to your goals. Self-Discipline Self-discipline is another one of those dirty words. We’re told to take it easy. Go with the flow. Don’t sweat it. The myth of fast and easy pervades modern society. This may convince you to buy a lot of junk you don’t need, but it isn’t an effective way to run your life if fulfillment and success matter to you. Self-discipline is the willingness to do what it takes to achieve the results you want regardless of your mood. Motivation starts the race, but self-discipline ultimately crosses the finish line. Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth If that’s you—if you have too many passions and don’t know which one to focus on—here’s what you do:1/13/2014
If you’ve got a pile of possibilities in front of you right now and the idea of editing is overwhelming, step up into the observatory tower and gaze into the land of Harvesting. Which destination feels like success? Which one feels good, but not great? Which one feels okay, but not awesome? When I did this exercise, it forced me to realize that to progress as a copywriter in the company I worked for, I would probably need to become a creative director. I would manage projects and people, which would mean I’d spend less time actually writing. That pretty quickly became a destination I wasn’t eager to arrive at. If you’ve got ten paths, this simple exercise will help you eliminate a few pretty quickly. Especially the ones you’re just good at. Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean it’s the road to awesome for you.
If that’s you—if you have too many passions and don’t know which one to focus on—here’s what you do: Pick one and start. Don’t try to prioritize your list. I used to tell people to do this, and it was a mistake on my part. I would say, “Make a list of all your passions, from most interesting to least interesting. Then start working on the one you are most interested in.” This seemed like good advice, but it’s not. The list is miserable. It’s a crippling waste of time. Instead, just pick one and start. If they’re all passions, then what is the worst thing that can happen? You spend time doing something you enjoy and realize along the way it’s not what you enjoy the most? How is that a fail? That’s called an edit. If you wait to create a perfect prioritized list or just simply wait because you don’t know where to start, you are guaranteed zero percent joy because you’ve worked on zero percent of your passions. I’m horrible at math, but even I know some is better than none. Start on something. Edit it if it’s not your awesome. Move on to the next thing. Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work that Matters Success and failure come and go but don’t let them define you. It’s who you are that matters. And if the outcome doesn’t match your desire, you won’t crash in the process. Instead, you’ll walk away with the lessons learned and go on to create far greater things. Each time, giving your effort. Each time, being your true self.
The secret is this: pick something that is important to you. One thing. Look at your belief on it, what you know to be true. Then, as if diving off a board, your feet already in the air, you commit. The commitment is the most important part. Not a promise, but deep and from the heart, there is no going back. You have burned the bridges, sunk the ships behind you. This is the only true thing that matters. Do the work. Do the work. Do the work. Do the work. Do the work. Do. The. Work. This will transform your life. Do this for fitness, for example, going all in, working out and eating healthy daily and a month later, you’ll be amazed at the person in the mirror. Do this for your truth, and you will be so amazing that the world will open doors to you that you never knew existed. This is the simple secret. Pick something you truly want. Commit. Commit on paper. To yourself. Dive in, do the work. You’ll leave the board, falling and falling…until you notice gravity lessen, your rate of descent slowing until it reverses and then…and then, you’re flying Live Your Truth by Kamal Ravikant Focus means changing only one habit at a time.
I’ve found it best to spend at least one month exclusively on one habit before moving to the next. For example, let’s say you want to wake up earlier, exercise more often, and introduce a new organizational system at work. You recognize that your current habits for sleep, health, and work are slowing you down, and you want to make some positive changes. If you’re like most people, you’ll start by tackling all three at once. This might even work, for a short time. But after a week or two, something will cause you to slip with one of these new activities. In the beginning you’re relying entirely on willpower, so when a behavior slips, it goes back to the default behavior you had been using before. A smarter strategy is to implement each new habit successively, focusing on just one new habit a month. The first month you focus on waking up earlier. The second month on regular exercise. The third month on a new system for your work. Although thirty days may not be enough time to form a new default habit (one study suggests sixty-six days as a median time for habituation6), it will at least mean the habit requires less effort to pick back up in case of a setback. The next insight for changing habits is called classical conditioning. This is a basic psychological principle first discovered by Ivan Pavlov through his famous experiment with dogs. Pavlov would ring a bell and then bring his dogs food. Soon enough, the dogs would salivate after hearing the bell, anticipating food. This salivation would continue even if the food never arrived, showing that the dogs automatically associated the sound of the bell with a meal. Consistency means that you try to do a habit the same way each time. Imagine you wanted to set up a deliberate practice routine, where you work on a tough skill you’re trying to master for your career. Let’s say you want to commit to working on it for around three hours per week. One way you could do this is to do one hour, three days per week, when you have time. Some days you might do it before work, other days after; sometimes on weekdays and sometimes on weekends. This may work, but it’s hardly consistent. As a result, the habit will take a lot longer to become automatic. Instead, imagine that you spent thirty-five minutes each day immediately after work on that skill. Now the behavior is very consistent. It takes place on the same days, in the same conditions, in exactly the same fashion. It won’t be long before doing your practice routine after work becomes an automatic part of your day. Maximize Your Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks & Build an Incredible Career (The 99U Book Series) by Jocelyn K. Glei, 99U |
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