Mike Tyson:
My mission is to go and destroy, and not let anything get involved. You punch, you get hurt, I refused to get hurt, knocked down, or knocked out. I can't lose, I refuse to lose. The intensity of that quote says it all I try and do many things, some work, some do not, many do not. One thing that gives me an edge on a hard job is that I make sure that whatever I do, whatever job is on, that I bring the focus and drive to get it done. . I make sure I am focused and bring my full attention and intensity to every task and every work day. Every time. I go hard and di what it takes to win. When I enter into a task, or a pull into a parking lot to do a job, I instantly take the mindset of Mike Tyson in 1986. At that time, in that year, he was unstoppable. My brain just switches on that way. It is automatic now. On the way to work, while I am in the car, I may listen to podcasts or have the Black Keys playing loud or laughing at a radio show but once I am at the job, I go all Mike Tyson 1986. The Mike Tyson I am talking about is the man in 1986, before everything went wrong and he was making stunning progress, winning fight after fight, before success and the loss of his mentor derailed him. At that moment in time, he was simply the best. I am talking Mike Tyson at the beginning, back when his coach Cus D'Amato was still there to help guide him. That Tyson was awesome. Every time he entered the ring, he entered stripped down, no socks just the shoes, and a plain set of black trunks. No glitz, no gold, just a man ready to go. When he was interviewed why he was dressed so simply, I remember him saying that he wanted no comfort, this wasn't the time or the place. He was there to work, get the job done, destroy and eliminate anything that stops the job from getting done. He was a warrior, a man on a mission. He meant it, he wanted to it to be hard, he was ready for it to be a battle, he was ready, and his focus, drive, and intensity were awesome and amazing. That is how I approach each task, each job, each business opportunity. I Mike Tyson it. D Your world is a place of constant interconnecting streams of transactions. A infinite amount of possibility and opportunity surrounds you.
Your business can be anything you create, if you work at it, and you think and experiment, because of this work, the business and you grow. Look at all the things you own, your computer, your book, your TV, your clothes, and know that is is all connected and all the result of transactions. Some yours, some other peoples. All of it is connected. Everywhere and everyone and everything is connected. This is a very important concept, because if you can see the transactions around you thrn it means that you can also see the opportunity. I am sitting on a plane when I write this on my phone, looking at all the connections around me. My phone is full of apps that I bought, full of music that I listen to (Cat Power - Sun) and while I listen, I watch people drink sodas put on board as a incentive to buy them again off the plane and each is a promotional roll out by the soft drink manufacturers. We eat peanuts that given for the same reason. Thank you California Growers. I am flying Southwest and I have read books about the company, and their structure. I have taken some of their ideas and made them my own. Their web site linked me to the rental car place, each side benefiting from the connection. At the car place (Avis) I learned all about bad customer service and what not to do. I am reading the $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau on my Kindle. the book written as Chris traveled the world, probably edited in Portland. The Kindle, thank you China. Drill down further. I used to manage a plant that made the cleaners for the seats and surfaces of aircraft. I helped produce the materials to see cracks in plane parts under black lights. I have made inks that are made to print the newspapers next to me. Everything is treated, created, and made. Each of those steps is a transaction. These are opportunities. The clothes we wearing are from around the globe, different countries, different carriers or freight companies, different retailers with unique styles or brands. Some imported, some exported. The supply chains built by companies today are amazing and they exist for every imaginable product. Every single thing around uou is the result of a transaction. Start looking a little closer. D Today’s technology is constantly evolving and improving. What seemed impossible fifteen years ago, is now completely known world-wide and a basic part of life. It ius amazing what we can do today. Think of the markets that have collapsed. The music industry, becuase now you can be your own record comany. Book publuishers are on the way out, because if you want to write and publish yourself today, you can. You can do anything, and it is only getting better. The tools have only begun to start the change in markets and business.
You have the tools to run a business today that the CEO’s of the world’s largest companies didn’t have ten years ago. These tools allow a solopreneur to do alone what before took and an entire large company full of people. You have an iPhone in your hand that has more computing power than the computers used to land a man on the moon. You have access to knowledge and tools that the greatest minds of history not only didn’t have, but didn’t dream of having. You need to use these tools. Know them. Own them, and once you can, you can grow and make your business do anything. That is what the starting of these business experiments and what this site is all about. There is a huge potential in on line business, and it truly has just started. My starting a simple business on line taught me the basics so that I began to learn what questions to ask and what to do next. Just doing anything makes things happen and the best way to learn is to decide to do a project and then find a way to make it happen, learn those specific skills you need to make it happen. Start it today. While you are at it, the secret to success is to network, and then network some more, and try to meet as many people as you can. With each connection comes more opportunity. I plan on running different Business experiments, basing them off what I havwe read or learned, and letting you find out what I find out. If you want to make your business better, you need to make yourself better. Your business is only as good as you. Let's go. D PS: Join our mailing list. Give me some ideas on how to improve, and let us show you what we have learned to make you and your business better. I like this book by Rob Walling a lot, and it is obviously a book written by someone who lives business. His viewpoint on the value of your time is great, so I thought I would pass it on. D by Rob Walling Changing Your Time Mindset It’s a big leap moving from employee to entrepreneur. One of the biggest adjustments is accepting that time is your most precious commodity. Dollarizing The phrase “dollarize” is used in sales to describe the approach of showing your prospect how your price is less expensive than your competition due to the amount of money they will save in the long run. For example, you can dollarize a screw10 by showing how your deliveries are always on-time, your defect rate is half that of your competitors and your screws can withstand an additional 500 lbs. of stress, each resulting in time saved in material handling and warranty calls. If you take it a step further and you possess the appropriate data, you can approximate how much money your screws will save your prospect in a given year based on the number of times your competitors deliver late and how many defects the customer will avoid by using your screws. It’s a powerful technique and a way to turn an otherwise commodity purchase into a bottom-line savings. Dollarizing Your Time In the same vein, dollarizing your time is the idea of putting a theoretical dollar amount on each hour you work. If you value your time at $100/hour it makes certain decisions, such as outsourcing work to a $6/hour virtual assistant, a no-brainer. Putting a value on your time is a foundational step in becoming an entrepreneur, and it’s one many entrepreneurs never take. Skipping this step can result in late nights performing menial tasks you should be outsourcing, and an effective hourly rate slightly above minimum wage. It never seems like a good idea to pay someone out of your own pocket for something you can do yourself…until you realize the economics of doing so. Approaches to Dollarizing Your Time There are two approaches to dollarizing your time. Choose the one that makes the most sense for your situation. Approach #1: Freelance Rates If you are a freelance developer or consultant, you probably have an hourly rate. This is a good place to start. If you bill clients $60/hour, then an hour of your time is worth $60. If you don’t perform freelance work, do a search on Craigslist or Guru11 for freelancers in your local area with similar skills. As a developer with a few years of experience you’ll likely see rates in the $40 and up range. Frankly, if you have no other information, stay at $50/hour is a good number to start with. Approach #2: Salary If you don’t perform freelance work or have difficulty finding comparative freelancers online, another approach is to divide your current salary + benefits by 2,000 (the approximate number of hours worked in a year), rounded up to the nearest $5 increment. It varies widely, but a typical benefits package including 401k matching, disability insurance, health care, and time off can range from 20-45% of your salary. You can come close to determining the real dollar amount using your pay stub and a bit of math, but if you just want to take a swing at it use 30%. So if your salary is $60,000 per year, 30% of that is an additional $18,000 making your effective salary $78,000. $78,000 divided by 2,000 gives you an hourly rate of approximately $39/hour, or $40/hour when rounded up to the nearest $5 increment. Be aware that freelance rates are nearly always higher than salaried rates because freelancers spend a portion of their time on non-billable tasks such as invoicing, marketing, sales, etc… They have to increase their billable rate to make up for these non-billable hours. Ultimately it’s up to you, but I would tend towards using the higher freelance rate for your time, especially since it’s closer to what you would receive on the open market if you chose to pursue freelance work. Realizations Several realizations stem from dollarizing your time. Realization #1: Outsourcing is a Bargain Once you’ve established you’re worth $50/hour, paying someone $6/hour to handle administrative tasks or $15/hour to write code seems like a trip to the dollar store. Outsourcing aspects of your business is the single most powerful approach I’ve seen to increasing your true hourly rate as an entrepreneur. Realization #2: Keep Work and Play Separate Wasting time is bad. Boring movies, bad TV, and pointless web surfing are expensive propositions. If you aren’t enjoying something, stop doing it Work hard and play hard, but never do both at once. Realization #3: Wasting Time is Bad If your time is worth, say $75/hour, standing in line at the bank is painful. Sitting in traffic is another money waster – every non-productive, non-leisure minute you spend is another $1.25 down the drain. Since it’s not practical to assume you will never wait in line again, the best counter-attack is to have a notebook and pen handy at all times. Realization #4: Information Consumption is Only Good When it Produces Something The following discussion excludes consumption for pleasure, such as: reading a novel, watching The Daily Show, catching a movie, etc. Consuming and synthesizing are very different things; it’s easy to consume in mass quantity. It’s much more difficult to synthesize information. Have you ever read through an entire magazine only to realize you can’t remember any specifics about what you just read? As someone who likely enjoys consuming in large quantities, at some point you will realize that you are wasting an enormous amount of time. I highly recommend putting the following into place: When reading blogs or books or listening to podcasts or audio books, take action notes. Action notes are short- or long-term to-do items that apply directly to my businesses. For example, I listen to several SEO podcasts. If they mention an interesting website, I make a note to check it out the next time I’m able. As they mention a new SEO technique I create a specific to-do to try that approach on one of my websites. I make the action note specific so I can act on it quickly the next time I have a few spare minutes. If I were to write something general like “Google Webmaster Tools,” it doesn’t help me. But if I write “Create Google Webmaster Tools Account for DotNetInvoice,” I can act on this quickly and cross it off my list without having to do much real thinking. Action notes allow you to quickly determine which resources provide real value and which are fluff. Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup Step into problems. Something bad happens, something needs to be done that is hard, that you don't know how to do? The best thing to do is to step firmly into it.,
That is how you learn. That is how you grow and advance. Avoiding it does nothing. Too many people try to avoid problems, ignore them, hope they go away, we they should pursue them, chase them down. Problems are opportunities. People are always amazed because when I find a problem, I step into it. Hard. By stepping into a problem you are then able to grow and you are forced to learn and take risks and be creative to solve problems. You make new connections both in your brain with new neural pathways being developed and externally through a network of new people and places and skills.Creativity is linked to problem solving. You want to be more creative? Solva some problems, everyday. Make a list, everyday. Head on. Stepping into a problem also gives you control. You go from being knocked off balance or at the mercy of the external forces of the problem and you spend your days hoping for it to go away or to magically improve or with you hoping someone will come to rescue you and solve your problem to a active person who is taking charge of your life and world. Most people feel stress when they feel they have no control over a situation. Once you take steps to modify the situation, your attitudes change and the stress level drops. I am one of those people who find a snake and then have to poke it with a stick. It means you learn a lot about snakes. It is how you learn, and how you find and make opportunity. D How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It by Mark Cuban
Love him or hate him, Mark Cuban is a very smart guy, who has made a career out of being outspoken and doing things his way. I read his blog, which is great, and this book is a collection of some of the best. I have highlighted the parts that gave what I thought was the best advice. D "I had to kick myself in the ass and recommit to getting up early, staying up late and consuming everything I possibly could to get an edge. I had to commit to making the effort to be as productive as I possibly could. It meant making sure that every hour of the day that I could contact a customer was selling time, and when customers were sleeping, I was doing things that prepared me to make more sales and to make my company better. And finally, I had to make sure I wasn’t lying to myself about how hard I was working. It would have been easy to judge effort by how many hours a day passed while I was at work. That’s the worst way to measure effort. Effort is measured by setting goals and getting results. What did I need to do to close this account? What did I need to do to win this segment of business? What did I need to do to understand this technology or that business better than anyone? What did I need to do to find an edge? Where does that edge come from, and how was I going to get there? The one requirement for success in our business lives is effort. Either you make the commitment to get results or you don’t. The thing you do need to do is learn. Learn accounting. Learn finance. Learn statistics. Learn as much as you can about business. Read biographies about businesspeople. You don’t have to focus on one thing, but you have to create a base of knowledge so you are ready when it’s time. School isn’t the end of the learning process, it’s purely a training ground and beginning. In my humble opinion, once you have learned how to learn, then you can try as many different things as you can, recognizing that you don’t have to find your destiny at any given age—you just have to be prepared to run with it when you do.R Of course, there is always a caveat to destiny, and that’s obligation. The greatest obstacle to destiny is debt, both personal and financial. Never settle. There is no reason to rush. If you aren’t happy with where you are, simplify your life and go out and try as many things as it takes to find what you may be destined to be. If there is such a thing. In basketball you have to shoot 50 percent. If you make an extra 10 shots per hundred, you are an All-Star. In baseball you have to get a hit 30 percent of the time. If you get an extra 10 hits per hundred at bats, you are on the cover of every magazine, lead off every SportsCenter and make the Hall of Fame. In business, the odds are a little different. You don’t have to break the Mendoza Line (hitting .200). In fact, it doesn’t matter how many times you strike out. In business, to be a success, you only have to be right once. One single time and you are set for life. That’s the beauty of the business world. The point of all this is that it doesn’t matter how many times you fail. It doesn’t matter how many times you almost get it right. No one is going to know or care about your failures, and neither should you. All you have to do is learn from them and from those around you because … All that matters in business is that you get it right once. Then everyone can tell you how lucky you are. You said, and I’m paraphrasing: “Everyone has got the will to win; it’s only those with the will to prepare that do win.” In a lifetime of running businesses I have developed a lot of rules that have been almost infallible. Here are a few of them that I use religiously to this day: 1. Everyone is a genius in a bull market 2. Win the battles you are in before you take on new battles It’s a huge lesson for entrepreneurs. Win the battles you are in first, then worry about expansion internationally or into new businesses. 3. You can drown in opportunity Few businesses only have one opportunity. Every entrepreneur’s mind goes crazy with the new and exciting things she can do beyond the new and exciting things she is already doing. The risk is that you can drown in all these opportunities. So let’s start at the beginning. In this post I am only going to provide you with the very first and most important of all the rules for anyone starting a business. Rule #1: Sweat equity is the best startup capital The best businesses in recent entrepreneurial history are those that began with little or no money. There weren’t 100-page-long business plans. In all of my businesses, I started by putting together spreadsheets of my expenses, which allowed me to calculate how much revenue I needed to break even and keep the lights on in my office and my apartment. I wrote overviews of what I was selling, why I thought the business made sense, an overview of my competition, why my product and/or service would be important to my customers and why they should buy or use it. All of it went down on a piece of yellow paper or in a word processing file, and none of it cost me more than the diet soda I was drinking while I was writing it up. I remember the foundation for each of my businesses. Once I could put the idea on paper, I gave the company a name. From there, I took the most important step: I tried to find people to shoot holes in the name. Each inquiry cost me next to nothing to get great feedback. Each enabled me to check the foundation of my business idea to see if it was easy to shoot holes in, and most importantly, they all served as sales calls. Each company eventually became a customer of ours. There are only two reasonable sources of capital for startup entrepreneurs: your own pocket and your customers’ pockets. Success is about making your life a special version of unique that fits who you are—not what other people want you to be. How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It It was Aaron Spelling, I believe, who said, “TV is the path of least resistance from complete boredom.” Which is another way of saying that it’s easier to watch TV than to sit there and do nothing. Which describes exactly how people make most of their choices in life. They take the easy way. They take the path of least resistance. There are certain things in life we all have to do. There are certain things in life we choose to do. Then there is everything else. The things we do to kill time. In every case, all things being equal, we choose the path of least resistance. Understanding this concept is key to making good business decisions. Moral of the story: Make your product easier to buy than your competition, or you will find your customers buying from them, not you. The cheaper you can live, the greater your options. Remember that. 5. Start the day motivated with a positive attitude You are going to screw up. We all do. I can’t tell you how many times I did and continue to. It happens too often. But no matter what happens, every morning, the minute after you wipe away the crust from your eyes, remind yourself that you are going to enjoy every minute of the day. You are going to enjoy the twenty interviews you have. You are going to enjoy waiting in the heat for your roommate to pick you up afterward. You are going to enjoy realizing how frayed your collar has become and how sick you are of your one, lonesome tie. You are going to enjoy all the bullshit you have to deal with as you chase your goals and dreams, because you want to remember them all. Each and every experience will serve as motivation and provide great memories when you finally make it all happen. It’s your choice. Entrepreneurs always need to be reminded that it’s not the job of their customers to know what they don’t. In other words, your customers have a tough enough time doing their jobs. They don’t spend time trying to reinvent their industries or how their jobs are performed. Instead, part of every entrepreneur’s job is to invent the future. I also call it “kicking your own ass.” Someone is out there looking to put you out of business. Someone is out there who thinks they have a better idea than you have. A better solution than you have. A better or more efficient product than you have. If there is someone out there who can “kick your ass” by doing it better, it’s part of your job as the owner of the company to stay ahead of them and “kick your own ass” before someone else does. 1. Time is more valuable than money You have to learn how to use time wisely and be productive. How wisely you use your time will have far more impact on your life and success than any amount of money. 3. No balls, no babies This is something a blackjack dealer once told me when I asked him if I should hit or stick. It is also my favorite line and probably the thing I tell myself the most. Once you are prepared and you think you have every angle of preparation covered, you have to go for it. No balls, no babies 9. It’s not whether the glass is half empty or half full, it’s who is pouring the water This is one of my favorites. The key in business and success at any endeavor is doing your best to control your destiny. You can’t always do it, but you have to take every opportunity you can to be as prepared as—and ahead of—the competition as you possibly can be. Take the lead, and you can control your own destiny." How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It Official Get Rich Guide to Information Marketing: Build a Million Dollar Business Within 12 Months by Robert Skrob
This book, that I am still reading, is more interesting than I thought it would be. It had a forward by Dan Kennedy, and I thought the book was by him. Once I started reading I understood it was not him, but the author is very knowledgeable, and the book is interesting, and as you can see below, I found many things to capture. The point is this: You make the rules. You bend this business to your preferences. You need sacrifice nothing for enormous financial success. How did that quote go? The world is made by unreasonable people. Make it the way you want it. It does take work. You won’t become successful or wealthy without work, but success is not a result of working harder than everyone else. It’s about building a business with specific attributes that enable you to accumulate wealth. People all around you are getting rich. Within your neighborhood. Why are they getting rich? Because they are doing things that generate more money than they spend, allowing them to accumulate wealth. Wealth isn’t produced by thinking, dreaming, or imagining what you want. Money doesn’t care what you think about most. Money is attracted to you when you create a business that produces value for paying customers. Before you launch a new business, you need to ask yourself these five questions: 1. Is it formulaic? Has the business been proven to generate wealth for others in the past? For instance, if you don’t see anyone getting rich as a plumbing contractor or by running a sandwich shop, it’s a good guess that you won’t get wealthy that way either. Instead, look for a consistent pattern of a good percentage of business owners getting rich within the industry; technology, real estate, and publishing are proven winners from the past. 2. Does it have a large business scope? Businesses dedicated to one community or one county can get destroyed with one flood or one plant closing. Instead, serve customers nationwide or even internationally to diversify and expand your marketplace. 3. Are there high margins? Selling products at higher prices with a low production cost allows you to do much more marketing. I had a client who sold frozen yogurt. With new customers spending only $5.00 to $10.00, it took a lot of them to pay for any advertising. Instead, get into businesses with high margins to make it easier for you to generate a healthy profit. 4. Is there a low startup investment? Too many business owners invest their entire life savings into a venture only to discover there is no market for their new products. Instead, keep your investments low, to $10,000.00 or even less. This way, even if you make a mistake, it won’t be financially devastating to you. Plus, it will allow you to start multiple businesses over time to generate more wealth as your skills improve. 5. Are there any professional licenses? Government-issued licenses are one way competitors control each other. Industry lobbyists conspire with politicians to “protect consumers” by passing new restrictions and threatening to take your license away. These laws do nothing for consumers. They are designed to protect your competitors. Stay away from professions that require a professional license, such as insurance, financial advising, law, or medicine. That license is used to control what you say in your marketing and to restrict your ability to generate wealth. There are six advantages of an information marketing business: 1. Replaces manual labor by “multiplying yourself” and leveraging what you know. 2. Buyers of your information products will buy more. 3. A small amount of interaction with buyers is possible. 4. Few staff members are necessary. 5. Little investment is needed to get started. 6. Large profit potential exists. People who buy your information products are much more likely to hire you to perform services than other customers you market to. Quite simply, having your own published information product makes you the obvious expert. You just need to leverage the information you already know. How? By 1) identifying a market of people who are excited about the information you have, 2) creating a product those people want, and 3) offering it to them in a persuasive way. That’s why you can get into the information marketing business with a relatively low startup budget. One word of caution: Many info-marketers do not invest enough in their marketing and end up with a very slow start. Investing money in marketing when you are launching your business increases revenue more quickly. You can take a “stair-step” approach by investing a small amount in your first campaign and reinvesting your sales revenues into the next campaign. You can increase your marketing investments as you continue to have success in selling your product. That way you can start with a very modest investment, but by continuing to reinvest profits into making new sales and getting new customers, you can build your business. This is a business with a lot of profitability, but you will not create a business that generates more than $1 million a year by investing nothing. You must be willing to test a marketing strategy to find new customers (known in the business as a front-end marketing funnel) and test it until it produces positive results. When you get positive results, you must invest in expanding that marketing campaign and growing your customer base. Many info-marketers are making million-dollar incomes through their information marketing businesses. Each one started out like you, with no products and no customers, and they gave it a shot. Information marketing is responsive to and fueled by the ever-increasing pressure on people’s time. For me, information marketing is providing solutions to problems in a convenient and useful format. When I create an information product, I spend a lot of time studying a market, examining the problems its members face, and designing my offering as the solution to that problem. Information marketing is providing solutions to problems in a convenient and useful format. ..... you have the free content you offer to attract new customers to you. Your free content could be articles you publish, videos you make available on your website, or an e-mail auto responder series that provides ongoing free content. You’ll have your largest number of users at this level. It’s free, so there is a low barrier to entry. Your next step of your Information marketing .......is an introductory product. For some info-marketing businesses, this is a $199.00 product consisting of six CDs and a binder of materials. For others, it could be a book that’s available in bookstores. This book provides customers with an easy first step to try out your products to see if your information is right for them. Here is also where e-books fit in. You’ve seen a lot of online marketers marketing e-books on their websites. To maximize the number of e-books you can sell, you must invest in marketing. When you build the rest of your pyramid, you increase the revenue you generate from each customer, allowing you to invest more in marketing to get a new customer than you could with an e-book as your only product. Once your customers experience your product, you offer them the opportunity to receive ongoing information through a monthly continuity program. These continuity programs are monthly subscription programs where you provide interviews, newsletters, and/or access to a membership site where your customers can get more of the information they loved in your introductory product. The pricing for these programs can be from $9.95 a month for a membership site to $199.00 a month for a program that includes newsletters, group coaching calls, and expert interviews on CD. The next step is high-priced specialty products shown in Figure 3-4. It’s impossible to build one product that provides all the information any of your customers could want or need about a particular topic. Instead, you provide a high-quality introductory product that outlines your strategies and provides useful examples to follow. Then for different areas of expertise, you provide additional products that provide additional details about that particular aspect. You will be able to sell these specialty products for much higher prices, from $495.00 to $1,995.00 or more. Large info-marketing business includes seminars. There’s nothing as powerful as being face to face with your members. The next area is seminars, shown in Figure 3-5. Many info-marketers choose not to offer seminars, and that’s fine. But for those who do offer them, it can be a lucrative part of their business. Info-Marketing seminars are usually priced between $750.00 and $1,995.00 per person or more. The next section is a coaching program. I talk a lot about moving your customers up your pyramid into group coaching and seminars in Chapter 10, but for now, recognize this is an important level of your pyramid. Group coaching gives your customers the opportunity to receive personal help implementing your teaching in their own lives. At the top you’ll find personal coaching. Some customers will invest in all your products and still want to sit down with you for one-on-one, personal assistance. And the best part for you is they will be willing to pay you for that privilege. So you need to keep these three factors in the forefront of your mind as you begin your business: Marketing Research Continuity Income Marketing Systems to Generate New Customers. The single most common reason information marketing businesses fail is inadequate market research. Many of us get caught up in creating just the right marketing strategy, writing the perfect sales letter, or building the perfect product, but in fact, very few of those things can have as much impact on your business as thorough market research. Researching your market and interviewing potential customers is the shortcut to launching a profitable business quickly. Continuity income is revenue you receive from your members on an ongoing basis Start every month of the year with customers already buying products from you with monthly continuity programs. Just think about this: If only 5 percent of your new customers participate in your continuity program, then every month your monthly continuity income continues to grow. The power of these programs is in providing monthly cash flow for your business. So when you have a big promotion or a seminar and make a large amount of money, you can pull it out in profit because your monthly continuity income is paying your monthly bills. You start each month billing customers’ credit cards so you can provide the newsletters, products, or services you’ve committed to those subscribers. It’s a great way to start in business every month—with revenue already in the bank. The real secret to the information marketing business is to build a marketing process, a funnel if you will, that generates new customers over and over again. This process generates leads, and those leads go into a sales system that helps potential customers learn about you and how you can solve their problems before inviting them to make a purchase. Once they’ve made a purchase, the sales system invites them to make other purchases based on their interests. That helps increase the value of every customer. And in addition to their purchases, you invite these new customers to participate in your monthly continuity programs so you can grow your monthly income as well. Every new business needs new customers to grow. Information marketers unlock the “business owner” lifestyle by creating an automated process to generate new customers every month from a variety of sources. New customer generation is one of the most difficult parts of any business and often can be the most expensive as well. This is why so many new info-marketers move on to other areas of their businesses once they get their businesses going. They become focused on product creation or putting on a new seminar, for example. However, as an information marketer, it’s crucial that you set up ongoing systems and processes to help you generate new customers. You need to have a marketing funnel that helps put new customers into your business on a continual basis Official Get Rich Guide to Information Marketing: Build a Million Dollar Business Within 12 Months Even in a set-it-and-forget-it situation, you still are going to have to innovate; you still need to replace, update, correct, improve, monitor, and build new processes as you go. Internet marketing provides a lot of great tools information marketers can use to create, sell, and deliver products. However, internet marketing tools do not create a business. Instead, your focus has to be on creating a business first and then using internet marketing tools to allow you to grow more quickly. Membership websites can be an important part of an info-business. Plus, they can be a useful forum for members to exchange ideas. However, you may have seen marketers promoting how to create membership sites where everybody interacts and communicates, with members contributing all the content so you don’t have to do any of the work. Those membership sites are very rare, making up less than 1 percent of the sites that are created. Most membership sites are a great tool to help facilitate a membership program that also provides printed content and monthly teleseminars, and they also serve as forums for delivering content for coaching programs. The membership site that stands alone, generates new customers by itself, and generates content by itself because all the participants are communicating with each other on message boards and uploading samples? That site is a very rare beast. First of all, in the information marketing business, the customers who love you are going to want to invest in more products and services from you. If you have a business that is simply selling a particular product over a website, you’re not maximizing the marketing investment you made in generating new customers by selling them additional products and services. You need a way of providing those customers additional products, additional programs, and additional systems so they are able to solve additional problems in their lives and you are able to make more money from your business. Any business that doesn’t have that element is not generating as much profit as it should be. Well, the reason they’re doing it that way is because customers often prefer seminars to digital downloads. And the internet marketer can make a lot more money by having those seminars. For you, it’s better to go ahead and get into business with the expectation that you’re going to be interacting with your people because eventually you are—if you want to generate the real money you want and unlock the lifestyle you desire. Finally, there’s the issue of human interaction. I know one of the elements that really attracted me to the information marketing business was limited interaction. And it actually is a benefit, as mentioned in Chapter 1, but my picture of limited human interaction was that I never had to interact with customers at all. They would consult my frequently asked questions if they needed something; otherwise, they’d go to the site, buy, receive the product, and I would never have to interact with them. Well, the fact is many of the people who buy your products will want additional help and support from you or your team. While many customers go to the website to buy, many others browse the website and then pick up the phone to place their orders with live operators. If I didn’t have someone there ready to take their orders, I would lose those sales. It’s not important for you to become the foremost expert in all topics; instead, become an expert in one topic that’s useful to your target market. They’ll become your customers even though they may know more than you in other areas of expertise. You’ve got to find the market that is excitedly expecting what you have to offer, or you have to offer what your target market is already excitedly expecting. The most important factor in a successful info-business is finding a market with customers who eagerly desire information. “Everyone says to go find a target market and research it, but not too many people go into as much detail as I did. But it’s so beneficial.” As you plan your information marketing venture, be sure you start with the market first. Find out what the market desperately wants before you create a product and a marketing campaign to sell it. Official Get Rich Guide to Information Marketing: Build a Million Dollar Business Within 12 Months Find your niche, know it - being everything to everyone will make you in the end, lonely and poor. The more you drill down to a market, and get very specific, usually go three levels down. The better you know that market the better your business will do. Know your market, who they are, what they look for, and most importantly, what they need and want to buy. The market isnít about you, it doesnít care what your passions are, so it is critical that you understand this. You need to get your customer what they want, and what you want is secondary.
On the plus side, what the internet has shown us all, is that no matter what we like, what odd quirky thing we find interesting, we now know there are similar people with similar interests out there online. The more we understand that, the better the business. D The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It by Ph.D., Kelly McGonigal
I loved this book, it was a book that I literally made myself slow down and read only one chapter a week. I would find myself thinking about it off and on all week. Definitely a book to make your self better. (I am now reading The Power of Habit and it is having the same impact.) TO SUCCEED AT SELF - CONTROL , YOU NEED TO KNOW HOW YOU FAIL I believe that the best way to improve your self-control is to see how and why you lose control. Knowing how you are likely to give in doesn’t, as many people fear, set yourself up for failure. It allows you to support yourself and avoid the traps that lead to willpower failures. Self-knowledge—especially of how we find ourselves in willpower trouble—is the foundation of self-control. One thing the science of willpower makes clear is that everyone struggles in some way with temptation, addiction, distraction, and procrastination. These are not individual weaknesses that reveal our personal inadequacies—they are universal experiences and part of the human condition. I’m a scientist by training, and one of the very first things I learned is that while theories are nice, data is better. This is so how I live my life. Before you can change something, you need to see it as it is. Although you could read this whole book in one weekend, I encourage you to pace yourself when it comes to implementing the strategies. Students in my class take an entire week to observe how each idea plays out in their own lives. They try one new strategy for self-control each week, and report on what worked best. I recommend that you take a similar approach, especially if you plan to use this book to tackle a specific goal such as losing weight or getting control over your finances. Give yourself time to try out the practical exercises and reflect. Pick one strategy from each chapter—whichever seems most relevant to your challenge—rather than trying out ten new strategies at once. First time I ever actually did this. When people say, “I have no willpower,” what they usually mean is, “I have trouble saying no when my mouth, stomach, heart, or (fill in your anatomical part) wants to say yes.” Think of it as “I won’t” power. But saying no is just one part of what willpower is, and what it requires. “Just say no” are the three favorite words of procrastinators and coach potatoes worldwide. At times, it’s more important to say yes. All those things you put off for tomorrow (or forever)? Willpower helps you put them on today’s to-do list, even when anxiety, distractions, or a reality TV show marathon threaten to talk you out of it. Think of it as “I will” power—the ability to do what you need to do, even if part of you doesn’t want to. “I will” and “I won’t” power are the two sides of self-control, but they alone don’t constitute willpower. To say no when you need to say no, and yes when you need to say yes, you need a third power: the ability to remember what you really want. Willpower is about harnessing the three powers of I will, I won’t, and I want to help you achieve your goals We may all have been born with the capacity for willpower, but some of us use it more than others. People who have better control of their attention, emotions, and actions are better off almost any way you look at it. They are happier and healthier. Their relationships are more satisfying and last longer. They make more money and go further in their careers. They are better able to manage stress, deal with conflict, and overcome adversity. They even live longer. When pit against other virtues, willpower comes out on top. Self-control is a better predictor of academic success than intelligence (take that, SATs), a stronger determinant of effective leadership than charisma (sorry, Tony Robbins), and more important for marital bliss than empathy (yes, the secret to lasting marriage may be learning how to keep your mouth shut). If we want to improve our lives, willpower is not a bad place to start. For most of evolutionary history, the prefrontal cortex mainly controlled physical movement: walking, running, reaching, pushing—a kind of proto-self-control. As humans evolved, the prefrontal cortex got bigger and better connected to other areas of the brain. As the prefrontal cortex grew, it took on new control functions: controlling what you pay attention to, what you think about, even how you feel. Many temporary states—like being drunk, sleep-deprived, or even just distracted—inhibit the prefrontal cortex, (Makes me wonder if mine even works at all) Some neuroscientists go so far as to say that we have one brain but two minds—or even, two people living inside our mind. There’s the version of us that acts on impulse and seeks immediate gratification, and the version of us that controls our impulses and delays gratification to protect our long-term goals. (I believe this is actually bigger than this, we are many people.) This is what defines a willpower challenge: Part of you wants one thing, and another part of you wants something else. Or your present self wants one thing, but your future self would be better off if you did something else. Every willpower challenge is a conflict between two parts of oneself. For your own willpower challenge, describe these competing minds. What does the impulsive version of you want? What does the wiser version of you want? Some people find it useful to give a name to the impulsive mind, like “the cookie monster” to the part of you that always wants instant gratification, “the critic” to the part of you that likes to complain about everyone and everything, or “the procrastinator” to the person who never wants to get started. Giving a name to this version of yourself can help you recognize when it is taking over, and also help you call in your wiser self for some willpower support Neuroeconomists—scientists who study what the brain does when we make decisions—have discovered that the self-control system and our survival instincts don’t always conflict. In some cases, they cooperate to help us make good decisions. To have more self-control, you first need to develop more self-awareness. A good first step is to notice when you are making choices related to your willpower challenge. For at least one day, track your choices. At the end of the day, look back and try to analyze when decisions were made that either supported or undermined your goals. Trying to keep track of your choices will also reduce the number of decisions you make while distracted—a guaranteed way to boost your willpower. The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It Ask your brain to do math every day, and it gets better at math. Ask your brain to worry, and it gets better at worrying. Ask your brain to concentrate, and it gets better at concentrating. Not only does your brain find these things easier, but it actually remodels itself based on what you ask it to do. Some parts of the brain grow denser, packing in more and more gray matter like a muscle bulking up from exercise. For example, adults who learn how to juggle develop more gray matter in regions of the brain that track moving objects. Areas of the brain can also grow more connected to each other, so they can share information more quickly. For example, adults who play memory games for twenty-five minutes a day develop greater connectivity between brain regions important for attention and memory. I love this paragraph. I believe it really is the heart of what I do. Or you could do something a lot simpler and less painful: meditate. Neuroscientists have discovered that when you ask the brain to meditate, it gets better not just at meditating, but at a wide range of self-control skills, including attention, focus, stress management, impulse control, and self-awareness. People who meditate regularly aren’t just better at these things. Over time, their brains become finely tuned willpower machines. One study found that just three hours of meditation practice led to improved attention and self-control. After eleven hours, researchers could see those changes in the brain. The new meditators had increased neural connections between regions of the brain important for staying focused, ignoring distractions, and controlling impulses. Another study found that eight weeks of daily meditation practice led to increased self-awareness in everyday life, as well as increased gray matter in corresponding areas of the brain. It may seem incredible that our brains can reshape themselves so quickly, but meditation increases blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, in much the same way that lifting weights increases blood flow to your muscles. The brain appears to adapt to exercise in the same way that muscles do, getting both bigger and faster in order to get better at what you ask of it. WILLPOWER EXPERIMENT:A FIVE-MINUTE BRAIN-TRAINING MEDITATION Breath focus is a simple but powerful meditation technique for training your brain and increasing willpower. Here’s how to get started: 1. Sit still and stay put . Sit in a chair with your feet flat on the ground, or sit cross-legged on a cushion. Sit up straight and rest your hands in your lap. It’s important not to fidget when you meditate—that’s the physical foundation of self-control. If you notice the instinct to scratch an itch, adjust your arms, or cross and uncross your legs, see if you can feel the urge but not follow it. 2. Turn your attention to the breath. Close your eyes or, if you are worried about falling asleep, focus your gaze at a single spot (like a blank wall, not the Home Shopping Network). Begin to notice your breathing. Silently say in your mind “inhale” as you breathe in and “exhale” as you breathe out. When you notice your mind wandering (and it will), just bring it back to the breath. 3. Notice how it feels to breathe, and notice how the mind wanders. After a few minutes, drop the labels “inhale/exhale.” Try focusing on just the feeling of breathing. You might notice the sensations of the breath flowing in and out of your nose and mouth. Start with five minutes a day. When this becomes a habit, try ten to fifteen minutes a day. If that starts to feel like a burden, bring it back down to five. A short practice that you do every day is better than a long practice you keep putting off to tomorrow. It may help you to pick a specific time that you will meditate every day, like right before your morning shower. If this is impossible, staying flexible will help you fit it in when you can. Even when he was focused on his breath, other thoughts sneaked in. He was ready to give up on the practice because he wasn’t getting better at it as quickly as he hoped, and figured he was wasting his time if he wasn’t able to focus perfectly on the breath. Most new meditators make this mistake, but the truth is that being “bad” at meditation is exactly what makes the practice effective. Science is discovering that self-control is a matter of physiology, not just psychology. It’s a temporary state of both mind and body that gives you the strength and calm to override your impulses. you have inherited from your ancestors an instinct that helps you respond to any threat that requires fighting or running for your life. This instinct is appropriately called the fight-or-flight stress response. You know the feeling: heart pounding, jaw clenching, senses on high alert. the fight-or-flight stress response is an energy-management instinct. It decides how you are going to spend your limited physical and mental energy. For your willpower challenge, identify the inner impulse that needs to be restrained. What is the thought or feeling that makes you want to do whatever it is you don’t want to do? Heart rate variability is such a good index of willpower that you can use it to predict who will resist temptation, and who will give in. For example, recovering alcoholics whose heart rate variability goes up when they see a drink are more likely to stay sober. These findings have led psychologists to call heart rate variability the body’s “reserve” of willpower—a physiological measure of your capacity for self-control. If you have high heart rate variability, you have more willpower available for whenever temptation strikes. Many factors influence your willpower reserve, from what you eat (plant-based, unprocessed foods help; junk food doesn’t) to where you live (poor air quality decreases heart rate variability—yes, L.A.’s smog may be contributing to the high percentage of movie stars in rehab). Anything that puts a stress on your mind or body can interfere with the physiology of self-control, and by extension, sabotage your willpower. Anxiety, anger, depression, and loneliness are all associated with lower heart rate variability and less self-control. Chronic pain and illness can also drain your body and brain’s willpower reserve. But there are just as many things you can do that shift the body and mind toward the physiology of self-control. The focus meditation you learned in the last chapter is one of the easiest and most effective ways to improve the biological basis of willpower. It not only trains the brain, but also increases heart rate variability. Anything else that you do to reduce stress and take care of your health—exercise, get a good night’s sleep, eat better, spend quality time with friends and family, participate in a religious or spiritual practice—will improve your body’s willpower reserve. WILLPOWER EXPERIMENT: BREATHE YOUR WAY TO SELF-CONTROL You won’t find many quick fixes in this book, but there is one way to immediately boost willpower: Slow your breathing down to four to six breaths per minute. That’s ten to fifteen seconds per breath—slower than you normally breathe, but not difficult with a little bit of practice and patience. Slowing the breath down activates the prefrontal cortex and increases heart rate variability, which helps shift the brain and body from a state of stress to self-control mode. A few minutes of this technique will make you feel calm, in control, and capable of handling cravings or challenges. Research shows that regular practice of this technique can make you more resilient to stress and build your willpower reserve. One study found that a daily twenty-minute practice of slowed breathing increased heart rate variability and reduced cravings and depression among adults recovering from substance abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder. Heart rate variability training programs (using similar breathing exercises) have also been used to improve self-control and decrease the stress of cops, stock traders, and customer service operators—three of the most stressful jobs on the planet there are many things you can do to support the physiology of self-control, this week I’m going to ask you to consider the two strategies that have the biggest bang for their buck. Both are inexpensive and immediately effective, with benefits that only build with time Exercise turns out to be the closest thing to a wonder drug that self-control scientists have discovered. For starters, the willpower benefits of exercise are immediate. Fifteen minutes on a treadmill reduces cravings, as seen when researchers try to tempt dieters with chocolate and smokers with cigarettes. The long-term effects of exercise are even more impressive. It not only relieves ordinary, everyday stress, but it’s as powerful an antidepressant as Prozac. Working out also enhances the biology of self-control by increasing baseline heart rate variability and training the brain. When neuroscientists have peered inside the brains of new exercisers, they have seen increases in both gray matter—brain cells—and white matter, the insulation on brain cells that helps them communicate quickly and efficiently with each other. Physical exercise—like meditation—makes your brain bigger and faster, and the prefrontal cortex shows the largest training effect If you want a quick willpower fill-up, your best bet may be to head outdoors. Just five minutes of what scientists call “green exercise” decreases stress, improves mood, enhances focus, and boosts self-control. Green exercise is any physical activity that gets you outdoors and in the presence of Mama Nature. Here are some ideas for your own five-minute green exercise willpower fill-up: • Get out of the office and head for the closest greenery. • Cue up a favorite song on your iPod and walk or jog around the block. • Take your dog outside to play (and chase the toy yourself). • Do a bit of work in your yard or garden. • Step outside for some fresh air and do a few simple stretches. • Challenge your kids to a race or game in the backyard. If you tell yourself that you are too tired or don’t have the time to exercise, start thinking of exercise as something that restores, not drains, your energy and willpower.exercise as something that restores, not drains, your energy GAIN WILLPOWER IN YOUR SLEEP! If you are surviving on less than six hours of sleep a night, there’s a good chance you don’t even remember what it’s like to have your full willpower. Being mildly but chronically sleep deprived makes you more susceptible to stress, cravings, and temptation. It also makes it more difficult to control your emotions, focus your attention, or find the energy to tackle the big “I will” power challenges Why does poor sleep sap willpower? For starters, sleep deprivation impairs how the body and brain use glucose, their main form of energy. When you’re tired, your cells have trouble absorbing glucose from the bloodstream. This leaves them underfueled, and you exhausted. With your body and brain desperate for energy, you’ll start to crave sweets or caffeine. But even if you try to refuel with sugar or coffee, your body and brain won’t get the energy they need because they won’t be able to use it efficiently. This is bad news for self-control, one of the most energy-expensive tasks your brain can spend its limited fuel on. The kind of relaxation that boosts willpower is true physical and mental rest that triggers what Harvard Medical School cardiologist Herbert Benson calls the physiological relaxation response. Your heart rate and breathing slow down, your blood pressure drops, and your muscles release held tension. Your brain takes a break from planning the future or analyzing the past. To trigger this relaxation response, lie down on your back, and slightly elevate your legs with a pillow under the knees (or come into whatever is the most comfortable position for you to rest in). Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths, allowing your belly to rise and fall. If you feel any tension in your body, you can intentionally squeeze or contract that muscle, then let go of the effort Science also points us to a critical insight: Stress is the enemy of willpower. one of the most robust, if troubling, findings from the science of self-control: People who use their willpower seem to run out of it. The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It This finding has important implications for your willpower challenges. Modern life is full of self-control demands that can drain your willpower. Researchers have found that self-control is highest in the morning and steadily deteriorates over the course of the day. In study after study, no matter what task he used, people’s self-control deteriorated over time. A concentration task didn’t just lead to worse attention over time; it depleted physical strength. Controlling emotions didn’t just lead to emotional outbursts; it made people more willing to spend money on something they didn’t need. Resisting tempting sweets didn’t just trigger cravings for chocolate; it prompted procrastination. It was as if every act of willpower was drawing from the same source of strength, leaving people weaker with each successful act of self-control. These observations led Baumeister to an intriguing hypothesis: that self-control is like a muscle. When used, it gets tired. If you don’t rest the muscle, you can run out of strength entirely, like an athlete who pushes himself to exhaustion. other research teams have supported the idea that willpower is a limited resource. Trying to control your temper, stick to a budget, or refuse seconds all tap the same source of strength. And because every act of willpower depletes willpower, using self-control can lead to losing control. Many things you wouldn’t typically think of as requiring willpower also rely on—and exhaust—this limited well of strength. Trying to impress a date or fit into a corporate culture that doesn’t share your values. Navigating a stressful commute, or sitting through another boring meeting. Anytime you have to fight an impulse, filter out distractions, weigh competing goals, or make yourself do something difficult, you use a little more of your willpower strength. If your brain and body need to pause and plan, you’re flexing the metaphorical muscle of self-control Luckily there are things you can do to both overcome willpower exhaustion and increase your self-control strength. That’s because the muscle model doesn’t just help us see why we fail when we’re tired; it also shows us how to train self-control. If you never seem to have the time and energy for your “I will” challenge, schedule it for when you have the most strength. Even though the brain is an organ, not a muscle, it does get tired from repeated acts of self-control. Neuroscientists have found that with each use of willpower, the self-control system of the brain becomes less active. boosting blood sugar restored willpower. Low blood sugar levels turn out to predict a wide range of willpower failures, from giving up on a difficult test to lashing out at others when you’re angry. It is as if running low on energy biases us to be the worst versions of ourselves. In contrast, giving participants a sugar boost turns them back into the best versions of themselves: more persistent and less impulsive; more thoughtful and less selfish. How much energy, exactly, was getting used up during acts of mental self-control? And did restoring that energy really require consuming a substantial amount of sugar? University of Pennsylvania psychologist Robert Kurzban has argued that the actual amount of energy your brain needs to exert self-control is less than half a Tic Tac per minute. This may be more than the brain uses for other mental tasks, but it is far less than your body uses when it exercises. So assuming you have the resources to walk around the block without collapsing, the absolute demands of self-control couldn’t possibly deplete your entire body’s store of energy. The human brain has, at any given time, a very small supply of energy. It can store some energy in its cells, but it is mostly dependent on a steady stream of glucose circulating in the body’s bloodstream. Special glucose-detecting brain cells are constantly monitoring the availability of energy. When the brain detects a drop in available energy, it gets a little nervous. What if it runs out of energy? Like the banks, it may decide to stop spending and save what resources it has. It will keep itself on a tight energy budget, unwilling to spend its full supply of energy. The first expense to be cut? Self-control, one of the most energy-expensive tasks the brain performs. To conserve energy, the brain may become reluctant to give you the full mental resources you need to resist temptation, focus your attention, or control your emotions. University of South Dakota researchers X. T. Wang, a behavioral economist, and Robert Dvorak, a psychologist, have proposed an “energy budget” model of self-control. They argue that the brain treats energy like money. It will spend energy when resources are high, but save energy when resources are dropping. Importantly, it wasn’t the absolute level of blood sugar that predicted a participant’s choices—it was the direction of change. The brain asked, “Is available energy increasing or decreasing?” It then made a strategic choice about whether to spend or save that energy The brain may have a second motivation behind its reluctance to exert self-control when the body’s energy levels are dropping. Our brains evolved in an environment very different from our own—one in which food supplies were unpredictable. (Remember our trip to the Serengeti, when you were scavenging for antelope carcasses?) Dvorak and Wang argue that the modern human brain may still be using blood sugar levels as a sign of scarcity or abundance in the environment. To an energy-monitoring brain, your blood sugar level was an indicator of how likely you were to starve in the near future if you didn’t find something to eat, quick. A brain that could bias your decisions toward immediate gratification when resources are scarce, but toward long-term investment when resources are plenty, would be a real asset in a world with an unpredictable food supply. He who takes the biggest risks—from exploring new land to trying new foods and new mates—is often the most likely to survive (or at least have his genes survive). What appears in our modern world as a loss of control may actually be a vestige of the brain’s instinct for strategic risk-taking. To prevent starvation, the brain shifts to a more risk-taking, impulsive state. Indeed, studies show that modern humans are more likely to take any kind of risk when they’re hungry. For example, people make riskier investments when they’re hungry, and are more willing to “diversify their mating strategies” (evolutionary psychologist–speak for cheating on their partner) after a fast. But when your blood sugar drops, your brain will still favor short-term thinking and impulsive behavior. Your brain’s priority is going to be getting more energy, not making sure you make good decisions that are in line with your long-term goals. better plan is to make sure that your body is well-fueled with food that gives you lasting energy. Most psychologists and nutritionists recommend a low-glycemic diet—that is, one that helps you keep your blood sugar steady. Low-glycemic foods include lean proteins, nuts and beans, high-fiber grains and cereals, and most fruits and vegetables—basically, food that looks like its natural state and doesn’t have a ton of added sugar, fat, and chemicals. It may take some self-control to shift in this direction, but whatever steps you take (say, eating a hearty and healthy breakfast during the workweek instead of skipping breakfast, or snacking on nuts instead of sugar) will more than pay you back for any willpower you spend making the change. Researchers have put this idea to the test with willpower-training regimes. We’re not talking military boot camp or Master Cleanses here. These interventions take a simpler approach: Challenge the self-control muscle by asking people to control one small thing that they aren’t used to controlling. For example, one willpower-training program asked participants to create and meet self-imposed deadlines. Other studies have found that committing to any small, consistent act of self-control—improving your posture, squeezing a handgrip every day to exhaustion, cutting back on sweets, and keeping track of your spending—can increase overall willpower. And while these small self-control exercises may seem inconsequential, they appear to improve the willpower challenges we care about most, including focusing at work, taking good care of our health, resisting temptation, and feeling more in control of our emotions. The important “muscle” action being trained in all these studies isn’t the specific willpower challenge of meeting deadlines, using your left hand to open doors, or keeping the F-word to yourself. It’s the habit of noticing what you are about to do, and choosing to do the more difficult thing instead of the easiest WILLPOWER EXPERIMENT: A WILLPOWER WORKOUT If you want to put yourself through your own willpower-training regime, test the muscle model of self-control with one of the following willpower workouts: • Strengthen “I Won’t” Power: Commit to not swearing (or refraining from any habit of speech), not crossing your legs when you sit, or using your nondominant hand for a daily task like eating or opening doors. • Strengthen “I Will” Power: Commit to doing something every day (not something you already do) just for the practice of building a habit and not making excuses. It could be calling your mother, meditating for five minutes, or finding one thing in your house that needs to be thrown out or recycled. • Strengthen Self-Monitoring: Formally keep track of something you don’t usually pay close attention to. This could be your spending, what you eat, or how much time you spend online or watching TV. You don’t need fancy technology—pencil and paper will do. But if you need some inspiration, the Quantified Self movement (www.quantifiedself.com) has turned self-tracking into an art and science. Timothy Noakes, a professor of exercise and sports science at the University of Cape Town, had a different idea. Noakes is known in the athletic world for challenging deeply held beliefs. (For example, he helped show that drinking too many fluids during endurance competitions could kill an athlete by diluting the essential salts in the body.) Noakes is an ultra-marathon competitor himself, and he became interested in a little-known theory put forth in 1924 by Nobel Prize–winning physiologist Archibald Hill. Hill had proposed that exercise fatigue might be caused not by muscle failure, but by an overprotective monitor in the brain that wanted to prevent exhaustion. This theory says it is just a feeling generated by the brain to motivate us to stop, in much the same way that the feeling of anxiety can stop us from doing something dangerous, and the feeling of disgust can stop us from eating something that will make us sick. But because fatigue is only an early warning system, extreme athletes can routinely push past what seems to the rest of us like the natural physical limits of the body. These athletes recognize that the first wave of fatigue is never a real limit, and with sufficient motivation, they can transcend it. Some scientists now believe that the limits of self-control are just like the physical limits of the body—we often feel depleted of willpower before we actually are. In part, we can thank a brain motivated to conserve energy. Just as the brain may tell the body’s muscles to slow down when it fears physical exhaustion, the brain may put the brakes on its own energy-expensive exercise of the prefrontal cortex. This doesn’t mean we’re out of willpower; we just need to muster up the motivation to use it. Based on these findings, the Stanford psychologists have proposed an idea as jarring to the field of self-control research as Noakes’s claims were to the field of exercise physiology: The widely observed scientific finding that self-control is limited may reflect people’s beliefs about willpower, not their true physical and mental limits. The research on this idea is just beginning, and no one is claiming that humans have an unlimited capacity for self-control. But it is appealing to think that we often have more willpower than we believe we do. It also raises the possibility that we can, like athletes, push past the feeling of willpower exhaustion to make it to the finish line of our own willpower challenges. When your willpower is running low, find renewed strength by tapping into your want power. For your biggest willpower challenge, consider the following motivations: 1. How will you benefit from succeeding at this challenge? What is the payoff for you personally? Greater health, happiness, freedom, financial security, or success? 2. Who else will benefit if you succeed at this challenge? Surely there are others who depend on you and are affected by your choices. How does your behavior influence your family, friends, coworkers, employees or employer, and community? How would your success help them? 3. Imagine that this challenge will get easier for you over time if you are willing to do what is difficult now. Can you imagine what your life will be like, and how you will feel about yourself, as you make progress on this challenge? Is some discomfort now worth it if you know it is only a temporary part of your progress? this left them vulnerable to what psychologists call moral licensing. When you do something good, you feel good about yourself. This means you’re more likely to trust your impulses—which often means giving yourself permission to do something bad. Moral licensing doesn’t just give us permission to do something bad; it also lets us off the hook when we’re asked to do something good. For example, people who first remember a time when they acted generously give 60 percent less money to a charitable request than people who have not just recalled a past good deed. In a business simulation, managers of a manufacturing plant are less likely to take costly measures to reduce the plant’s pollution if they have recently recalled a time when they acted ethically. Simply put: Whenever we have conflicting desires, being good gives us permission to be a little bit bad. if the only thing motivating your self-control is the desire to be a good enough person, you’re going to give in whenever you’re already feeling good about yourself. The worst part of moral licensing is not just its questionable logic; the problem is how it tricks us into acting against our best interests. Don’t mistake a goal-supportive action for the goal itself. You aren’t off the hook just because you did one thing consistent with your goal. Notice if giving yourself credit for positive action makes you forget what your actual goal is. Ayelet Fishbach, professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, and Ravi Dhar, professor at the Yale School of Management, have shown that making progress on a goal motivates people to engage in goal-sabotaging behavior. In one study, they reminded successful dieters of how much progress they had made toward their ideal weight. They then offered the dieters a thank-you gift of either an apple or a chocolate bar. Eighty-five percent of the self-congratulating dieters chose the chocolate bar over the apple, compared with only 58 percent of dieters who were not reminded of their progress. A second study found the same effect for academic goals: Students made to feel good about the amount of time they had spent studying for an exam were more likely to spend the evening playing beer pong with friends. But when they also asked the participants to remember why they had resisted, the licensing effect disappeared—69 percent resisted temptation. Like magic, the researchers had discovered a simple way to boost self-control and help the students make a choice consistent with their overall goals. Remembering the “why” works because it changes how you feel about the reward of self-indulgence. That so-called treat will start to look more like the threat to your goals that it is, and giving in won’t look so good. Remembering the why will also help you recognize and act on other opportunities to accomplish your goal. The next time you find yourself using past good behavior to justify indulging, pause and remember the why. The researchers were intrigued by reports that when McDonald’s added healthier items to its menu, sales of Big Macs skyrocketed. The researchers found the same effect for vending machine choices. When a reduced-calorie package of cookies was added to a set of standard junk-food options, participants were more likely to choose the least healthy snack (which, in this case, happened to be chocolate-covered Oreos). Sometimes the mind gets so excited about the opportunity to act on a goal, it mistakes that opportunity with the satisfaction of having actually accomplished the goal. And with the goal to make a healthy choice out of the way, the unmet goal—immediate pleasure—takes priority. This illustrates a fundamental mistake we make when thinking about our future choices. We wrongly but persistently expect to make different decisions tomorrow than we do today. I’ll smoke this one cigarette, but starting tomorrow, I’m done. I’ll skip the gym today, but I’m sure I’ll go tomorrow. I’ll splurge on holiday gifts, but then no more shopping for at least three months. Such optimism licenses us to indulge today—especially if we know we will have the opportunity to choose differently in the near future. We look into the future and fail to see the challenges of today. This convinces us that we will have more time and energy to do in the future what we don’t want to do today. We feel justified in putting it off, confident that our future behavior will more than make up for it. The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It Behavioral economist Howard Rachlin proposes an interesting trick for overcoming the problem of always starting a change tomorrow. When you want to change a behavior, aim to reduce the variability in your behavior, not the behavior itself. Apply Rachlin’s advice to your own willpower challenge this week: Aim to reduce the variability of your behavior day to day. View every choice you make as a commitment to all future choices. So instead of asking, “Do I want to eat this candy bar now?” ask yourself, “Do I want the consequences of eating a candy bar every afternoon for the next year?” Or if you’ve been putting something off that you know you should do, instead of asking “Would I rather do this today or tomorrow?” ask yourself, “Do I really want the consequences of always putting this off?” Rather than giving himself permission to be good on some days and bad on others (which, predictably, led to more bad days than good), he decided to take the challenge of reducing the variability in his behavior. He settled on the strategy of “vegetarian before dinner.” He would stick to vegetarian foods until six p.m., then eat whatever he wanted to for dinner. Using a daily rule also helps you see through the illusion that what you do tomorrow will be totally different from what you do today. Jeff knew that if he broke his rule one day, he would—according to the experiment’s instructions—have to break it every day for the rest of the week. When a halo effect is getting in the way of your willpower challenge, look for a the most concrete measure (e.g., calories, cost, time spent or wasted) of whether a choice is consistent with your goals. • Virtue and vice. Do you tell yourself you’ve been “good” when you succeed at a willpower challenge, then give yourself permission to do something “bad”? • Are you borrowing credit from tomorrow? Do you tell yourself you will make up for today’s behavior tomorrow—and if so, do you follow through? • Halo effects. Do you justify a vice because of one virtuous aspect (e.g., discount savings, fat-free, protects the environment)? • Who do you think you are? When you think about your willpower challenge, which part of you feels like the “real” you—the part of you who wants to pursue the goal, or the part of you who needs to be controlled? As you will see, it’s not just electrodes in the brain that can trigger this system. Our whole world is full of stimuli—from restaurant menus and catalogs to lottery tickets and television ads—that can turn us into the human version of Olds and Milner’s rat chasing the promise of happiness. When that happens, our brains become obsessed with “I want,” and it gets harder to say, “I won’t.” When the brain recognizes an opportunity for reward, it releases a neurotransmitter called dopamine. Dopamine tells the rest of the brain what to pay attention to and what to get our greedy little hands on. A dopamine rush doesn’t create happiness itself—the feeling is more like arousal. We feel alert, awake, and captivated. We recognize the possibility of feeling good and are willing to work for that feeling. In the last few years, neuroscientists have given the effect of dopamine release many names, including seeking, wanting, craving, and desire. But one thing is clear: It is not the experience of liking, satisfaction, pleasure, or actual reward. The joy of winning was registered in different areas of the brain. Knutson had proven that dopamine is for action, not happiness. The promise of reward guaranteed that participants wouldn’t miss out on the reward by failing to act. What they were feeling when the reward system lit up was anticipation, not pleasure. The flood of dopamine marks this new object of desire as critical to your survival. When dopamine hijacks your attention, the mind becomes fixated on obtaining or repeating whatever triggered it. When we add the instant gratification of modern technology to this primitive motivation system, we end up with dopamine-delivery devices that are damn near impossible to put down. There are few things ever dreamed of, smoked, or injected that have as addictive an effect on our brains as technology. This is how our devices keep us captive and always coming back for more. The definitive Internet act of our times is a perfect metaphor for the promise of reward: We search. And we search. And we search some more, clicking that mouse like—well, like a rat in a cage seeking another “hit,” looking for the elusive reward that will finally feel like enough. Importantly, even if the reward never arrives, the promise of reward—combined with a growing sense of anxiety when we think about stopping—is enough to keep us hooked. If you’re a lab rat, you press a lever again and again until you collapse or starve to death. If you’re a human, this leaves you with a lighter wallet and a fuller stomach, at best. At worst, you may find yourself spiraling into obsession and compulsion. In one study, participants who sampled something sweet were more likely to purchase indulgent foods such as a steak or cake, as well as items that were on sale. The food and drink samples amplified the appeal of products that would typically activate the reward system. There was no effect, however, on utilitarian items like oatmeal and dishwasher liquid, demonstrating that even a hit of dopamine cannot make toilet paper irresistible to the average consumer (sorry, Charmin). The Stanford researchers who ran this study asked twenty-one food and nutrition experts to predict the results, and shockingly, 81 percent believed that the opposite would be true—that samples would decrease a shopper’s hunger and thirst, and satiate their reward seeking. This just goes to show how unaware most of us—experts included—are of the many environmental factors that influence our inner desires and behavior. Since it’s unlikely we’ll ever outlaw the promise of reward, we might as well put it to good use. We can take a lesson from neuromarketers and try to “dopaminize” our least favorite tasks. An unpleasant chore can be made more appealing by introducing a reward. And when the rewards of our actions are far off in the future, we can try to squeeze a little extra dopamine out of neurons by fantasizing about the eventual payoff (not unlike those lotto commercials). The promise of reward has even been used to help people overcome addiction. One of the most effective intervention strategies in alcohol and drug recovery is something called the fish bowl. Patients who pass their drug tests win the opportunity to draw a slip of paper out of a bowl. About half of these slips have a prize listed on them, ranging in value from $1 to $20. Only one slip has a big prize, worth $100. Half of the slips have no prize value at all—instead, they say, “Keep up the good work.” This means that when you reach your hand into the fish bowl, the odds are you’re going to end up with a prize worth $1 or a few kind words. This shouldn’t be motivating—but it is. In one study, 83 percent of patients who had access to fish bowl rewards stayed in treatment for the whole twelve weeks, compared with only 20 percent of patients receiving standard treatment without the promise of reward. Eighty percent of the fish bowl patients passed all their drug tests, compared with only 40 percent of the standard treatment group. When the intervention was over, the fish bowl group was also far less likely to relapse than patients who received standard treatment—even without the continued promise of reward. Amazingly, the fish bowl technique works even better than paying patients for passing their drug tests—despite the fact that patients end up with far less “reward” from the fish bowl than they would from guaranteed payments. This highlights the power of an unpredictable reward. Our reward system gets much more excited about a possible big win than a guaranteed smaller reward, and it will motivate us to do whatever provides the chance to win. This is why people would rather play the lottery than earn a guaranteed 2 percent interest in a savings account, and why even the lowest employee in a company should be made to believe he could someday be the CEO. But dopamine does have a dark side, one that’s not hard to see if we pay close attention. If we pause and notice what’s really going on in our brains and bodies when we’re in that state of wanting, we will find that the promise of reward can be as stressful as it is delightful. Desire doesn’t always make us feel good—sometimes it makes us feel downright rotten. That’s because dopamine’s primary function is to make us pursue happiness, not to make us happy. It doesn’t mind putting a little pressure on us—even if that means making us unhappy in the process. To motivate you to seek the object of your craving, the reward system actually has two weapons: a carrot and a stick. The first weapon is, of course, the promise of reward. Dopamine-releasing neurons create this feeling by talking to the areas of your brain that anticipate pleasure and plan action. When these areas are bathed in dopamine, the result is desire—the carrot that makes the horse run forward. But the reward system has a second weapon that functions more like the proverbial stick. When your reward center releases dopamine, it also sends a message to the brain’s stress center. In this area of the brain, dopamine triggers the release of stress hormones. The result: You feel anxious as you anticipate your object of desire. The need to get what you want starts to feel like a life-or-death emergency, a matter of survival. The promise of reward is so powerful that we continue to pursue things that don’t make us happy, and consume things that bring us more misery than satisfaction. Because the pursuit of reward is dopamine’s main goal, it is never going to give you a “stop” signal—even when the experience does not live up to the promise. Mindfully indulge, but don’t rush through the experience. Notice what the promise of reward feels like: the anticipation, the hope, the excitement, the anxiety, the salivation—whatever is going on in your brain and body. Then give yourself permission to give in. How does the experience compare with the expectation? Does the feeling of the promise of reward ever go away—or does it continue to drive you to eat more, spend more, or stay longer? When, if ever, do you become satisfied? Or do you simply reach the point of being unable to continue, because you’re stuffed, exhausted, frustrated, out of time, or out of the “reward”? People who try this exercise commonly have one of two results. Some people find that when they really pay attention to the experience of indulging, they need far less than they thought they would to feel satisfied. Others find that the experience is completely unsatisfying, revealing a huge gap between the promise of reward and the reality of their experience. Both observations can give you greater control over what has felt like an out-of-control behavior. When you’re feeling down, what do you do to feel better? If you’re like most people, you turn to the promise of reward. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), the most commonly used strategies for dealing with stress are those that activate the brain’s reward system: eating, drinking, shopping, watching television, surfing the Web, and playing video games. The APA’s national survey on stress found that the most commonly used strategies were also rated as highly ineffective by the same people who reported using them. For example, only 16 percent of people who eat to reduce stress report that it actually helps them. Neuroscientists have shown that stress—including negative emotions like anger, sadness, self-doubt, and anxiety—shifts the brain into a reward-seeking state. You end up craving whatever substance or activity your brain associates with the promise of reward, and you become convinced that the “reward” is the only way to feel better. The stress hormones released during a fight-or-flight response also increase the excitability of your dopamine neurons. That means that when you’re under stress, any temptations you run into will be even more tempting. Stress points us in the wrong direction, away from our clear-headed wisdom and toward our least helpful instincts. That’s the power of the one-two punch of stress and dopamine: We are drawn back again and again to coping strategies that don’t work, but that our primitive brains persistently believe are the gateway to bliss. According to the American Psychological Association, the most effective stress-relief strategies are exercising or playing sports, praying or attending a religious service, reading, listening to music, spending time with friends or family, getting a massage, going outside for a walk, meditating or doing yoga, and spending time with a creative hobby. (The least effective strategies are gambling, shopping, smoking, drinking, eating, playing video games, surfing the Internet, and watching TV or movies for more than two hours.) The main difference between the strategies that work and the strategies that don’t? Rather than releasing dopamine and relying on the promise of reward, the real stress relievers boost mood-enhancing brain chemicals like serotonin and GABA, as well as the feel-good hormone oxytocin. As part of our class experiment, Denise committed to doing yoga at least once. When she did, she felt even better than she had remembered and couldn’t believe she had talked herself out of it for almost three years. Knowing that she was likely to forget again and fall into her old routine, she made a voice memo on her phone after class one evening, describing how good she felt after doing yoga. When she was tempted to skip yoga, she listened to the memo to remind herself, knowing that she could not trust her impulses when she was stressed. We don’t just cling to guns and God when we’re scared; many of us also cling to credit cards, cupcakes, and cigarettes. Studies show that being reminded of our mortality makes us more susceptible to all sorts of temptations, as we look for hope and security in the things that promise reward and relief. This, no doubt, is how we end up with half the purchases that clutter our homes and pad our credit card bills. We’re feeling a little down, we come across an opportunity to purchase something, and a little voice—OK, a few dopamine neurons—in our head tell us, “Buy this—it’s everything you never knew you wanted!” Terror management strategies may take our minds off our inevitable demise, but when we turn to temptation for comfort, we may inadvertently be quickening our race to the grave. Case in point: Warnings on cigarette packages can increase a smoker’s urge to light up. A 2009 study found that death warnings trigger stress and fear in smokers—exactly what public health officials hope for. Unfortunately, this anxiety then triggers smokers’ default stress-relief strategy: smoking. Oops. It isn’t logical, but it makes sense based on what we know about how stress influences the brain. Stress triggers cravings and makes dopamine neurons even more excited by any temptation in sight. Sometimes terror management leads us not into temptation, but procrastination. Many of the most put-off tasks have a whiff of mortality salience about them: making a doctor’s appointment, filling a prescription and taking it when we’re supposed to, taking care of legal documents such as wills, saving for retirement, even throwing out things we’re never going to use again, or clothes we’ll never fit into. If there’s something you’ve been putting off or keep “forgetting” to do, is it possible that you are trying to avoid facing your vulnerability? If so, just seeing the fear can help you make a rational choice—the motivations we understand are always easier to change than the influences we cannot see. people who drank too much the previous night felt worse in the morning—headaches, nausea, fatigue. But their misery wasn’t limited to hangovers. Many also felt guilty and ashamed. That’s where things get disturbing. The worse a person felt about how much they drank the night before, the more they drank that night and the next. If you think that the key to greater willpower is being harder on yourself, you are not alone. But you are wrong. Study after study shows that self-criticism is consistently associated with less motivation and worse self-control. It is also one of the single biggest predictors of depression, which drains both “I will” power and “I want” power. In contrast, self-compassion—being supportive and kind to yourself, especially in the face of stress and failure—is associated with more motivation and better self-control. Surprisingly, it’s forgiveness, not guilt, that increases accountability. Researchers have found that taking a self-compassionate point of view on a personal failure makes people more likely to take personal responsibility for the failure than when they take a self-critical point of view. They also are more willing to receive feedback and advice from others, and more likely to learn from the experience. Below is an exercise that psychologists use to help people find a more self-compassionate response to failure. Research shows that taking this point of view reduces guilt but increases personal accountability—the perfect combination to get you back on track with your willpower challenge. 1. What are you feeling? As you think about this failure, take a moment to notice and describe how you are feeling. What emotions are present? What are you are feeling in your body? Can you remember how you felt immediately after the failure? How would you describe that? 2. You’re only human. Everyone struggles with willpower challenges and everyone sometimes loses control. This is just a part of the human condition, and your setback does not mean there is something wrong with you. Consider the truth of these statements. 3. What would you say to a friend? Consider how you would comfort a close friend who experienced the same setback. What words of support would you offer? A WRITER CHALLENGES THE VOICE OF SELF-CRITICISM Ben, a twenty-four-year-old middle-school social studies teacher with literary aspirations, had set the goal to finish writing his novel by the end of summer vacation. This deadline required him to write ten pages a day, every day. In reality, he would write two to three pages one day, then feel so overwhelmed by how far behind he was that he skipped the next day completely. Realizing that he wasn’t going to finish the book by the start of the school year, he felt like a fraud. If he couldn’t make the effort now, when he had so much free time, how was he going to make any progress when he had homework to grade and lessons to plan? Ben started to doubt whether he should even bother with the goal, since he wasn’t making the progress he thought he should be. “A real writer would be able to churn those pages out,” he told himself. “A real writer would never play computer games instead of writing.” In this state of mind, he turned a critical eye to his writing and convinced himself it was garbage. Ben had actually abandoned his goal when he found himself in my class that fall. He had enrolled in the class to learn how to motivate his students, but he recognized himself in the discussion about self-criticism. When he did the self-forgiveness exercise for his abandoned novel, the first thing he noticed was the fear and self-doubt behind his giving up. Not meeting his small goal to write ten pages a day made him afraid that he did not have the talent or dedication to realize his big goal of becoming a novelist. He took comfort in the idea that his setbacks were just part of being human, and not proof that he would never succeed. He remembered stories he had read about other writers who had struggled early in their careers. To find a more compassionate response to himself, he imagined how he would mentor a student who wanted to give up on a goal. Ben realized he would encourage the student to keep going if the goal was important. He would say that any effort made now would take the student closer to the goal. He certainly would not say to the student, “Who are you kidding? Your work is garbage.” From this exercise, Ben found renewed energy for writing and returned to his work-in-progress. He made a commitment to write once a week, a more reasonable goal for the school year, and one he felt comfortable holding himself accountable to. Unrealistic optimism may make us feel good in the moment, but it sets us up to feel much worse later on. The decision to change is the ultimate in instant gratification—you get all the good feelings before anything’s been done. But the challenge of actually making a change can be a rude awakening, and the initial rewards are rarely as transformative as our most hopeful fantasies (“I lost five pounds, and I still have a crappy job!”). As we face our first setbacks, the initial feel-good rush of deciding to change is replaced with disappointment and frustration. Failing to meet our expectations triggers the same old guilt, depression, and self-doubt, and the emotional payoff of vowing to change is gone. Polivy and Herman call this cycle the “false hope syndrome.” As a strategy for change, it fails. But that’s because it was never meant to be a strategy for change. It’s a strategy for feeling better, and these are not the same thing. If all you care about is the feeling of hope, this is not an irrational strategy. Resolving to change is, for most people, the best part of the change process. It’s all downhill after that: having to exert self-control, saying no when you want to say yes, saying yes when you want to say no. The effort of actually making the change cannot compare, from a happiness point of view, to the rush of imagining that you will change. And so it’s not only easier, but also much more fun, to milk the promise of change for all it’s worth, without the messy business of following through. That is why so many people are happier giving up and starting again, over and over, rather than finding a way to make a change for good. The high we get from imagining our own extreme makeovers is a difficult drug to quit. There is a fine line between the motivation we need to make a change, and the kind of unrealistic optimism that can sabotage our goals. We need to believe that change is possible; without hope, we’d resign ourselves to the way things are. But we must avoid the common trap of using the promise of change to fix our feelings, not to fix our behaviors. Otherwise, we can turn what looks like willpower into just another version of a rat pressing a lever, hoping this is the time we get the reward. Optimism can make us motivated, but a dash of pessimism can help us succeed. Research shows that predicting how and when you might be tempted to break your vow increases the chances that you will keep a resolution. For your own willpower challenge, ask yourself: When am I most likely to be tempted to give in? How am I most likely to let myself get distracted from my goal? What will I say to myself to give myself permission to procrastinate? When you have such a scenario in mind, imagine yourself in that situation, what it will feel like, and what you might be thinking. Let yourself see how a typical willpower failure unfolds. Then turn this imaginary failure into a willpower success. Consider what specific actions you could take to stick to your resolution. Do you need to remember your motivation? Get yourself away from the temptation? Call a friend for support? Use one of the other willpower strategies you’ve learned? When you have a specific strategy in mind, imagine yourself doing it. Visualize what it will feel like. See yourself succeed. Let this vision of yourself give you the confidence that you will do what it takes to reach your goal. Planning for failure in this way is an act of self-compassion, not self-doubt. When that moment of possible willpower failure hits, you will be ready to put your plan into • Forgiveness when you fail. Take a more compassionate perspective on your setbacks to avoid the guilt that leads to giving in again. • Optimistic pessimism for successful resolutions. Predict how and when you might be tempted to break your vow, and imagine a specific plan of action for not giving in. Economists call this delay discounting—the longer you have to wait for a reward, the less it is worth to you. Even small delays can dramatically lower the perceived value. With a delay of just two minutes, six M&M’s became worth less than two immediate M&M’s. The value of each M&M shrank as it became more distant. For your willpower challenge, ask yourself what future rewards do you put on sale each time you give in to temptation or procrastination. What is the immediate payoff for giving in? What is the long-term cost? Is this a fair trade? If the rational you says, “No, it’s a lousy deal!” try to catch the moment you reverse your preferences. What are you thinking and feeling that lets you put the future on sale? We only prefer the short-term, immediate reward when it is right there staring us in the face, and the want becomes overwhelming. This leads to bounded willpower—we have self-control until we need it. The good news is, temptation has a narrow window of opportunity. To really overwhelm our prefrontal cortex, the reward must be available now, and—for maximum effect—you need to see it. As soon as there is any distance between you and the temptation, the power of balance shifts back to the brain’s system of self-control. This time, the students were much more likely to choose the larger, delayed reward. Not being able to see the immediate reward made it more abstract and less exciting to the reward system. This helped the students make a rational choice based on mental calculations, not primal feelings. This is good news for those who want to delay gratification. Anything you can do to create that distance will make it easier to say no. For a cooler, wiser brain, institute a mandatory ten-minute wait for any temptation. If, in ten minutes, you still want it, you can have it—but before the ten minutes are up, bring to mind the competing long-term reward that will come with resisting temptation. If possible, create some physical (or visual) distance as well. If your willpower challenge requires “I will” power, you can still use the ten-minute rule to help you overcome the temptation to procrastinate. Flip the rule to “Do ten minutes, then you can quit.” When your ten minutes are up, give yourself permission to stop—although you may find that once you get started, you’ll want to keep going. When “never again” seems too overwhelming a willpower challenge to tackle, use the ten-minute delay rule to start strengthening your self-control. One reason is that most people are loss-averse—that is, we really don’t like to lose something we already have. Losing $50 makes people more unhappy than getting $50 makes them happy. When you think about a larger, future reward first and consider trading it in for a smaller, immediate reward, it registers as a loss. But when you start with the immediate reward (the $50 check in your hand) and consider the benefits of delaying gratification for a larger reward, it also feels like a loss. You can use this quirk of decision making to resist immediate gratification, whatever the temptation: 1. When you are tempted to act against your long-term interests, frame the choice as giving up the best possible long-term reward for whatever the immediate gratification is. 2. Imagine that long-term reward as already yours. Imagine your future self enjoying the fruits of your self-control. 3. Then ask yourself: Are you willing to give that up in exchange for whatever fleeting pleasure is tempting you now? The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It Be ruthless towards your business.
Pretend it isn't personal, pretend it belongs to someone else for a moment so you can look at your work objectively. If a fighter loses a fight, he starts training for the next one. That is what you need to do, shake it off, and start training for the next one. Just because you thought something was a good idea doesn't it mean it was a good idea. If a product isn't selling, tweak, test it, but in the end, if it is not working, stop selling it and find another. The important part is the model, how it works, not what product you are pushing through it. If the product doesn't work, it doesn't mean you failed, in fact you have done something great, you tried something most people just talk about, or wish for, but never actually get off their couches to go do. You did it, you got started, took the leap/ Selling a product that didn't work just means you need to try something different, you learned something from that product that you can use on the next product, and on the next, You learned what doesn't work, you learned new skills. The only way selling a product that doesn't sell hurts you is if you are too stubborn to learn from it and move on. If it doesn't sell, pick something else. D |
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Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” |