Just how committed are you to achieving your dreams and goals? Sure – we all say how much we want a better life, but just how far are you prepared to go to get it?
And here’s an interesting thing – if your answer to that last question was anything other than “whatever it takes” – think about what you are saying… If you are prepared to only go so far to achieve that goal, then what happens when you hit that limit? Will you stop, and declare your goal to be unachievable, or create a list of excuses why it won’t work for you?
If you really want to live that life extraordinary, then you have to be prepared to do the extraordinary things – the things that most people are not prepared to do – in order to get there. Anything less, and you simply cannot expect to achieve extraordinary results – the world does not work that way. Ordinary effort = ordinary results. Extraordinary effort = anything you can imagine!
Next time you are thinking about your dream life and what it will take to get there, as soon as you hear yourself thinking “I’ll do anything except for…” – watch out – that’s probably EXACTLY what you’ll need to do!
A man was walking in the park one day when he came upon a cocoon
with a small opening. He sat and watched the butterfly for several
hours as it struggled to force its body through the little hole. Then
it seemed to stop making any progress. It looked like it had gotten as
far as it could, so the man decided to help the butterfly. He used his
pocketknife and snipped the remaining bit of the cocoon.
The butterfly then emerged easily, but something was strange. The
butterfly had a swollen body and shriveled wings. The man continued to
watch the butterfly because he expected at any moment the wings would
enlarge and expand to be able to support the body, which would contract
in time. Neither happened. In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its
life crawling around with a swollen body and deformed wings. It was
never able to fly.
What the man in his kindness and haste did not understand was that
the restricting cocoon and the struggle required for the butterfly to
emerge was natural. It was nature’s way of forcing fluid from its body
into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved
its freedom. Sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in our lives.
If we were allowed to go through life without any obstacles, we
would be crippled. We would not be as strong as what we could have
been. And we could never fly.
History has shown us that the most celebrated winners usually
encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won
because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.
My good friend, Lou Holtz, football coach of the University of South
Carolina, once told me, “Show me someone who has done something
worthwhile, and I’ll show you someone who has overcome adversity.”
Beethoven composed his greatest works after becoming deaf. George
Washington was snowed in through a treacherous winter at Valley Forge.
Abraham Lincoln was raised in poverty. Albert Einstein was called a
slow learner, retarded and uneducable. If Christopher Columbus had
turned back, no one could have blamed him, considering the constant
adversity he endured.
As an elementary student, actor James Earl Jones (a.k.a. Darth
Vader) stuttered so badly he communicated with friends and teachers
using written notes.
Itzhak Perlman, the incomparable concert violinist, was born to
parents who survived a Nazi concentration camp and has been paralyzed
from the waist down since the age of four.
Chester Carlson, a young inventor, took his idea to 20 big
corporations in the 1940s. After seven years of rejections, he was able
to persuade Haloid, a small company in Rochester, N.Y., to purchase the
rights to his electrostatic paper- copying process. Haloid has since
become Xerox Corporation.
Thomas Edison tried over 2,000 experiments before he was able to get
his light bulb to work. Upon being asked how he felt about failing so
many times, he replied, “I never failed once. I invented the light
bulb. It just happened to be a 2,000-step process.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, elected President of the United States
for four terms, had been stricken with polio at the age of 39.
Persistence paid off for General Douglas MacArthur. After applying
for admission to West Point twice, he applied a third time and was
accepted. The rest is history.
In 1927 the head instructor of the John Murray Anderson Drama
School, instructed student Lucille Ball, to “Try any other profession.
Any other.”
Buddy Holly was fired from the Decca record label in 1956 by Paul
Cohen, Nashville “Artists and Repertoire Man.” Cohen called Holly “the
biggest no-talent I ever worked with.”
Academy Award-winning writer, producer and director Woody Allen
failed motion picture production at New York University (NYU) and City
College of New York. He also flunked English at NYU.
Helen Keller, the famous blind author and speaker, said: “Character
cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial
and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition
inspired and success achieved. Silver is purified in fire and so are
we. It is in the most trying times that our real character is shaped
and revealed.”
Mackay’s Moral: There is no education like the university of adversity.
– Harvey Mackay
Thanks to YourSuccessStore.com
We’d all like to think we have a positive effect on those around us – but just how good are you at being consistently cheerful and upbeat? Think about how you “normally” walk into your office – are people glad to see you, or do they hope you won’t tell them your latest tale of woe?
The thing is – how you appear on the outside makes a huge difference to how you feel on the inside. If you make an effort to be smiling, standly upright and walking boldly – you will feel happier and more courageous. Obstacles will seem less daunting and will often just vanish. And you will be a blessing to others – someone they want to be around and do business with.
Take a look at this blog entry from Joel Osteen Ministries – if something like this happened to you, would you get the same result? Or if you are in business for yourself – what would your customers do in your absence? Would they be happy to find someone else, or would they wait for you?
For all businesses, but especially for small businesses or entrepreneurs – your impact on those around you will determine your level of success. And one “off” day could ruin years of relationship building.
There are many things wrong with the “job” method of generating an income, in my opinion, but there’s one that has really been showing itself to me this last week or so – and that’s the problem of being on a fixed income. No matter if you are paid by the hour, or if you are on a salary – you are basically on a fixed income! And what makes it even worse is that your income is being fixed by someone else…
If this doesn’t sound accurate to you – consider this: if you had to raise an extra $1,000 in the next week – how would you go about doing that with your job?? Chances are, even if you worked all the overtime you could find, you would be coming up short on that target. But with your own business, things are a little different…
When you are running your own business, YOU get to decide just how much business you do in a week. And you get to decide just how many new customers or new distributors you are going to add that week. Sure – there is still only so much that you can do in a week, but you are now working in entrepreneurial time – so the payback can be exponentially higher, depending on how creative you are about expanding your business.
If you are on the fence about starting your own business – just think about how you would raise extra cash right now. For most of us in the corporate world, that means a loan or a credit card. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to create your own cash as and when you need it??
This train of thought came from some Wayne Dyer teachings on YouTube – if you haven’t heard of Wayne Dyer before, then I recommend you check out some of those free videos – he certainly brings a new way of thinking to things. But on this occasion, he was talking about what happens when you squeeze an orange…
OK – it’s not rocket science – you squeeze an orange and you get orange juice, right? So putting that fruit under pressure yields the very essence of the orange. Now take that to your life – what comes out when you get squeezed?
This is a very telling question – and not always a nice answer! When the pressure comes on (which could be financial, business, family or just being cut off at the lights) – that’s when your true feelings come out. When your defenses are down, and you are simply reacting to a situation rather than using the social filters that we all learn as adults – then your “juice” becomes evident. And all too often in our society, that’s not a very pleasant sight.
But the question that really got me thinking was “where does that juice come from?”! You see – an orange contains orange juice because of all the things that it has experienced – the weather, nutrients, sunlight, any chemicals used by the farmer. Sometimes you pick up an orange and there’s almost no juice in it, other times you might get a lot of juice but little flavor. There are many variations – just because you picked up an orange, does not mean that you can definitely say what is inside it.
So too with what is inside of us. Our “juice” is the result of our experiences, our mistakes and our successes, the TV we watch, the things we read, the friendships we keep and the conversations that we participate in. All of these have been mixing together and brewing into your character until one day, someone cuts you off in traffic, and we see just exactly what kind of juice has been developing.
The good news is that, unlike our poor squeezed orange, we have the opportunity to change our essence. But we have to be prepared to take a long, honest look at just what we have been putting into ourselves, and make some changes if we expect to make a difference. For me – I haven’t read a newspaper or watched the news on TV in 6 years – and I cannot honestly say that I have missed anything significant! But I have dramatically reduced the amount of negativity that I absorb. The next step is to replace that with positive input – personal development, like the Wayne Dyer videos linked above, or whatever works for you.
Bottom line – if you want good oranges, you have to feed your orange trees well. If you want a great character, tuned for success and prosperity in everything you do – then you have to feed your mind well. There are no short cuts, and the results may not show up overnight – but if you tend your mind and guard well what goes into it, then you can change!
It’s been a while since I last posted on here – and there’s a lot going on for us at the moment. After a year of wrestling with various business opportunities online, we are going back to the US to get into an awesome system – you can expect to hear about some incredible results here in the next 12 months! There are a lot of reasons for us making this decision, but one of the main things I have learned this year is that, when you are creating your own business, you need to take as many ethical shortcuts as you possibly can. There are no bonus points for doing things the hard way…
One of the best and fastest shortcuts is to find a successful mentor, doing what you want to do, and follow them. About the only thing better than that is if you have a mentor with a system, where you can literally plug into their advertising, use their leads and backoffice to create your own business. Nothing is ever guaranteed in your own business, of course, but if you do what someone has done before you – and you copy it exactly – then your chances are VASTLY improved!
So – I have a lot of personal development stuff that I want to share on here, but for right now – stay tuned! We are very excited to be getting into this system – it’s a business that’s been around a while, but with a brand new flavor to it.
There’s a great post on facing challenges here from Randy Gage: http://www.randygage.com/blog/building-character-through-facing-challenges
The question at the end is the key here – just how do you do when you are faced with challenges? I know that I have not always been as good as I could be at facing up to them – but I also know that every time I do two things happen. Firstly, they are never as bad as I’d feared! And secondly, once I’ve overcome that challenge, the feeling of relief is immense and I always learn something useful in the process.
A life without challenges is a stagnant life, and there is no way to avoid them if you want to grow. If you want to grow QUICKLY – seek out new challenges every day, and see just how quickly you can overcome them!
I was talking a few days ago about how more multi-millionaires are made in a depression than at any other time – and tonight I’ve just gotten a flavour for what that looks like already in this climate.
I was visiting my local copy-shop and, while waiting for the job to finish, I was talking to the manager there. To start with, she was just sharing the usual “doom and gloom” from the area – companies closing their doors and so on, but then she started talking about what they are seeing in their business.
In the last few months, they have never been busier – and the source of all this is new, small businesses! These are all being started by people who were good at their jobs, but found themselves out of work. So, instead of complaining to all who would listen, they took whatever resources they had and they started selling their services and building their own future.
There will be a huge number of success stories come out of these current economic challenges – to be sure, the companies that we know may well not be here, but others will be. As fast as old, out of shape businesses fall by the wayside; new, leaner and sharper companies will emerge. And the really great news is that we get to choose – to be one of the dinosaurs, or to be one of that new generation. I know which one I’m choosing!
If you have any kind of goals that you are working towards, then the chances are that you are spending some time visualising those goals. In fact, if you are NOT spending time doing that, I suggest you stop reading this and go work on that instead! The reason is simple – if you cannot see yourself having the things you want, then you are very unlikely to get them.
Now – for those of you who are already on that visualisation trail – here’s how to take that to the next step…
The first step is to visualise something that you KNOW is going to happen – going to work, eating dinner, reading this blog. Any event that you absolutely, 100% totally know will happen – no matter how trivial. Repeat this a few times for different events and note down all the details of your visualisation – were you seeing it through your own eyes or as a third person? Where there sounds? Smells? Colours? Really get to the bottom of all the details in your visualisation. This is important – GET THESE DOWN before you go onto the next step.
Now – the next step is to go to one of your “familiar” visualisations – something that you have been working on – maybe that new car, or that bigger house – whatever your main focus is right now. As you do this, note down all the same sort of details as you did for your “dead cert” visualisation.
Here’s what there is to notice – for many people (and certainly for me) – there is a huge difference between what my brain considers a “dead cert” and my goal visualisation. In order to really get the most from visualising, you have to get your subconscious to believe that it is already true, so your visualisations have to be convincing. The best way to be convincing is to copy what your brain already does.
So the final step? Go back to your goals, and recreate your visualisation along the same lines as how you see that “dead cert”. Tune it until it looks and feels like something that you absolutely know will happen – then your brain will start to function in that way too – and you will be unlocking the true power of visualising your targets!
This is a question that came to mind this morning, when I came across this quote:
“Strive for excellence, not perfection.” – H. Jackson Brown Jr.
Where does this fit into your business? For me – it comes under the heading of “procrastination”! Let me explain…
In order for you to have a business, you have to have a product or a service of some kind – whether it is yours, or you are selling as an affiliate, you have to have that product. Next you need some sort of a storefront – increasingly, you need to have your own website through which to promote – complete with articles, blogs, bio and so on. Then there’s all the backlinking strategy, the RSS feeds to set up, the email list opt-in page, the newsletter, the email series – the list goes on and on and on…
Here’s the problem – not ONE of those things actually generates any business!
There is only one step that actually generates business – yet we can spend literally months on all of these other steps, polishing and refining and tweaking to get the very best effect. But it is only when we take that final step that the business actually starts to move – up until that point, it is all pretty much an intellectual exercise.
The step I am talking about is of course selling – when you start to place ads and seriously create traffic to your website. If you are like me, you want to have the very best quality website to bring people to, but in order to get there you actually need to start creating traffic. Because the website you create will be perfect in your eyes, but until you start sending complete strangers to it, you will never know what they like, what brings them to make a purchase – and what will ultimately create sales for you.
Understand this – it is better to present your project 90% done, start creating traffic and continue to work on it – refining in the light of what that traffic does, then to try to complete the perfect website before launch. All of the top names work this way – that initial website needs to be good, but perfection will only come with that constant refinement.
Be excellent in your intentions and in your initial designs, but do not wait for perfection before launching it on the world.
